


Nothing to Lose but Our Chains

by Lepak



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: ACAB no exceptions, Case Fic, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Post-Canon, Racism, Seol and the Seolite diaspora feature heavily in this, Sexism, Slow Burn, some sexual content, the gang's all here and they won't shut up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:14:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23314468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lepak/pseuds/Lepak
Summary: Summer in Revachol blooms like pond algae. Kim installs those helium headlights, and Harry re-finishes a 20-hour mind project. In eighteen days, they'll open the container. In eighteen days, they’ll push themselves and their work to the brink. Low on the horizon, a reckoning slavers, snarling and pulling on its leash.In eighteen days, the case will release it.Tags and rating will change. Updates roughly once a month.
Relationships: Harry Du Bois & Kim Kitsuragi, Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi
Comments: 213
Kudos: 312





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kineema tuning | A diagnosis | Kim's coffee | Harry runs his mouth | Lines are set | An empty lot | An abandoned container | The opening

Summer in Revachol blooms like pond algae. It’s the first _truly_ hot day of the year, the sun is blaring, and Harry can’t remember being more sweaty. Logically he must have been, because summer recurs yearly, but the way his shirt sticks to his armpits, chest, and back like a second skin is an entirely new experience. It’s gross.

He rounds the corner onto Kim’s street. Harry isn’t sure why, on their one day off, Kim’s invited him over to work on the Kineema. So far, his help has been limited to not touching anything and dishing station gossip, but maybe Kim just wants company. Or his radio is broken. But either way Harry doesn’t mind. He’d rather hang out with Kim than lie on his fold-out bed in his shitty apartment, counting the minutes until he can go back to work.

He raps the half-open garage door. The bright yellow _Frittte!_ bag he holds clinks against his knee. 

“Reporting for duty, Lieutenant Kitsuragi,” he says, and ducks under it.

“Welcome back,” Kim says, elbow-deep in the Kineema’s engine, exactly where Harry had left him. “How was the walk?”

“Hot. Deserted. Pretty sure I sweated all my water weight.” Harry wipes his face with his handkerchief. 

Kim’s gaze wanders down Harry’s sodden chest, then flicks back to the engine. A fan spins sluggishly in the corner, moving hot air around.

“Everyone’s indoors avoiding sun sickness,” Kim says. “Heidelstam claims the crime rate falls on days like this.” 

“Yea, well, Heidelstam says a lot of bullshit.” 

Kim snorts and suppresses a grin.

“What, you don’t think so?” Harry mops the back of his neck. “The Wompty-Dompty-Dom Centre can’t be real. Bet Vredefort isn't either.”

“It doesn’t exist. Oranje is a Moralintern conspiracy designed to artificially inflate grain prices.”

Harry laughs. “Torso’s been cornering you at the coffee maker too?”

Kim runs his fingers over a wire, checking for kinks. “He’s… persistent. But what _is_ real is heat exhaustion. Please remember to hydrate.”

“Water is boring.”

“It’s necessary for life.” 

Harry brandishes a neon green chip packet. “I bought snacks. They were on offer, and I didn’t remember if I liked them, so I got them. Do you like,” he reads the label, “'Pow! Pommes™'?” 

“The trademark is silent, detective,” Kim says, glancing up from the snarl of wires and valves. His eyes are soft and fond. 

Harry quickly looks down at the _Frittte!_ bag. “Got cola, too. Couldn’t find your sarsaparilla, it’s been discontinued everywhere.” 

“It _was_ a long shot, but thank you.” Kim smiles. It’s _devastating._

Just when Harry realises he’s been staring, Kim turns his attention back to the engine. 

“I’m almost done here," Kim says, "just put mine aside for now.”

Harry sits and watches him do something very complicated with a spanner, then stretches his legs and opens the packet of 'Pow! Pommes silent-™'. He has relearnt many things since Martinaise: attire appropriate for an RCM officer on an active investigation; what paperwork can be safely ignored; that Lt. Jean Vicquemare expresses concern by swearing at you, your mother, her mother, the sky, the ground, and everything between. 

He pops a chip in his mouth. And now he's learnt he hates 'Pow! Pommes t-fucking-m'. He chokes down the mushy, too-sweet apple chip and grabs one of the colas.

Condensation dews on the bottle. Harry licks it, thinking about beer. A voice in him still bays for it, the head's creamy foam, how it makes people funnier, light kinder. But every time he smells it, all he sees is the hanged man sloughing off a branch, ripe with rot. He sticks to cola. 

Another drop rolls down the bottle. Harry licks again. He notices Kim watching him.

"You're supposed to drink what's _inside_ ," Kim says, pushing up his glasses. His hair is slumped across his sweaty forehead, motor oil is streaked across his nose and right cheek. Harry wants to tell him that he looks like a hungover tiger.

"I am learning everyday," Harry says instead.

Kim braces his bare arms against the Kineema. "Have you forgotten how to open them?" he says, and quirks his lips. 

Harry has been considering the problem of Kim’s mouth. It keeps him up at night. "Some things I will never forget," he says. Corpse stink fills his nose. He shakes his head to clear it. "Want yours now? I haven’t licked it, promise."

Kim nods and wipes his hands on a rag. Harry angles the two bottles together, pops their caps and hands one to the lieutenant, who murmurs his thanks. Kim downs his bottle in one go, head thrown back, and a bead of sweat rolls into the hollow of his throat. 

Harry wants to lick it. He stares at his cola instead.

He thinks—knows—that licking Kim would be a bad idea because: 

  1. Fraternisation, though not banned, breaks Rule One of the cop code: don't fuck your partner. 
  2. His brain is a hot scrambled mess, and doing sexy licking things _will_ send it over the edge. 
  3. Right now, Kim will be very salty.
  4. He's not a homo-sexual. 
  5. Probably? 
  6. Non-homo-sexuals want to lick their not-partner-partner partners sometimes, right? 
  7. That's how camaraderie works, right? Two men sublimating the urge to lick each other into a totally platonic motor carriage project. Right?



"There's enough psychosexual repression here to power Jamrock for years," says the cola bottle, "like me, you are under much internal pressure."

"I am a self-aware individual who recognises and communicates his wants and needs to the people around him, thank you," Harry tells the cola bottle. It fizzes skeptically.

Harry continues, “I had an ex. When she left me, I erased all of my memories in a week-long drugs and alcohol binge. Proof I can't be homo-sexual.”

"I revise my earlier diagnosis: centuries. You have capital-I Issues, and your latent capacity for homo-sexuality does not even chart, to give you my professional opinion."

"You know what? I _don’t_ want it. Why are you even talking to me?"

"I can't talk; I’m a cola bottle."

"What do you—you're talking right now!"

"This is you externalising aspects of your psyche by anthropomorphising inanimate objects, i.e. me. This is a coping mechanism, and you disassociate in an attempt to distance yourself from your repressed desires. I am not talking, Mr. Du Bois. In reality, you are talking to yourself."

"That is fucking bullshit! You're just slapping big words together!"

"Anger is a normal defensive reaction to hearing an unwelcome truth. Besides, your _incisive_ observation just underlines my point. You have received no formal training to be a psychotherapist, so of course you would merely echo empty buzzwords you have heard in passing.”

"Oh yeah? Pass this!" Harry shouts, leaping to his feet. He winds his arm back to hurl the cola bottle through the fucking roof, and Kim is suddenly _there,_ gripping Harry’s upper arm and wrist.

"Let's not scare my neighbours," Kim says, low and calm in his ear.

"The bottle was trying to psychic-sexually analyse me, Kim!"

"Well, now they're intrigued. Give me the bottle, please." The lieutenant curls his hand around the bottleneck and taps Harry’s fingers. 

Harry lets go.

The bottle is set gently down. It drips condescendingly.

“Time for a break,” Kim says, loosening his grip and patting Harry’s arm. “Come inside. I have quieter colas in the fridge. Possibly coffee.” He ducks under the garage door. 

“Inside your house?” Harry says, following. It has never occurred to him that Kim goes home at the end of a shift. Instead he thought Kim winked in and out of existence, aerostatic bomber coalescing from air whenever Harry needed him. But now that he’s thought it, it sounds really stupid. 

Another thought vibrates frantically, trying to get his attention.

“Wait. You put coffee in the fridge?” Harry has been a cop for nearly two decades and this is the most depraved thing he’s ever heard. He might talk to garbage and threaten to shoot children, but he’s not an _animal._

Kim shrugs, walking to his door. “It’s hot out. And coffee tastes better brewed cold.”

“You make _coffee_ with _cold water?_ " Harry drifts after him. "Kim—that. Is. A. Crime. I am going to arrest you.”

“Not before you try my coffee.” Kim wipes his boots on the welcome mat. “It tastes best with _humble pie_.” 

“I will drag you back to the station in handcuffs and personally lock you in jail. Because you’re a criminal. Hah, Kim, you’re a—”

“Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Du Bois, I can and will arrest _you."_

They enter Kim’s house. The curtains are drawn and the room is cool and dim. As Harry’s eyes adjust, he notes the framed vintage motor carriage prints and tasteful sofa throw with surprise. But what isn’t a surprise is the giant map of Jamrock pinned to a wall. It dominates the living room.

Harry whistles. "Nice place, Kim. Very cosy."

"Well-lived in."

"Well-loved. It's a home."

Kim hums noncommittally, but Harry can tell he's pleased. 

"Kitchen's through here. Sit tight, detective." Kim ducks out of the room.

Harry examines the map. Photos and paper scraps constellate across it, linked by several different kinds of coloured string—some kind of Kim-specific organisational principle. Harry touches a green one. It thrums with thought.

“If you take anything out, please put it back where you found it,” Kim calls from the kitchen. There's the _woosh_ of the faucet.

“I’m just looking,” Harry calls back. 

Following the strings, he recognises the cases he and Kim have cracked during their short partnership—REVENGE OF THE SPEED DEMON, THE MAN WITH NO BLOOD, THE ELEVATOR-TURNED-GUILLOTINE—but he also wants to say that the wall makes Kim look like a sequence killer, and doesn’t that make dates awkward? But maybe the only people Kim brings home are in these blurry photographs, caught climbing out of motor carriages, smoking in alleyways, and crossing the street, always looking over their shoulders.

“This is really impressive,” Harry says instead. If he unfocuses his eyes, he can almost see a pattern emerge, a fractal of movement-cause-effect webbing through the district.

“I look like a sequence killer,” Kim says, coming up behind him. "But it helps me to conceptualize cases." 

Kim’s face is clean, hair swooped back again, and he holds two glasses of, ugh—Harry doesn’t even want to call it coffee. But he doesn’t want to hurt Kim’s feelings more, so he takes one.

"Okay, maybe it does. A little bit. But more importantly, it also shows grade-A police work. This,” Harry gestures to the map, “Is what the inside of this,” he taps his head, “Looks like. Except everything is pinned down and no stupid thoughts interrupt you.”

“Hmm.” Kim sips his coffee. “What did that cola bottle say anyway?” 

“Nothing important. That I have enough issues to power Jamrock for centuries.” 

Kim winces, and Harry immediately knows that he’s said the wrong thing. He swigs his coffee and says, “Hey Kim, you were right, coffee does taste better when it’s brewed with cold water." 

It takes a second for his tongue to catch up with his brain. “Oh my god, it does taste so much better.”

Kim still looks so serious and sad, and Harry hates it. He scrabbles for something else.

"It's okay, Kim, it was just me exsanguinating my psyche," Harry says, and attempts to smile. 

Kim draws himself up even straighter and squares his shoulders. "You are doing so well. Truly,” he says, “You've been sober for nearly half a year. A new record, according to Minot. You’ve recovered from total amnesia at a pace which has astounded medical practitioners and your colleagues. Most of all, me. I should not have made light of it."

"No, no, listen. You're fine. I'm fine. I appreciated the joke. It’s just banter between buddies, right?" Harry’s words bubble up so quickly that they trip over each other one the way out.

"No mocking here. Zip. Nada. Because you always have my back, Kim. We're a team. We're great detectives. And partners, but not partner-partners, which you should, obviously, know, on account of me not being a homo-sexual."

Kim narrows his eyes. 

Harry floors the conversational accelerator, racing towards the frozen sea. 

"I have nothing against homo-sexuals! Because sometimes I think, maybe, I am one? Not that I’m saying I am! But even if I wasn’t I would have zero problem with them—homo-sexuals. Can a person be one and a not-one at the same time? What's the word for that last one, anyway?"

"Hetero-sexual. Or did you mean bi-sexual?" Kim sighs, and it is a sigh with resonance, complex harmonies which span the full range of human exasperation. "I thought you'd finished _this_ mind project in Martinaise."

"I forgot it." 

"You forgot it."

"I was in a very vulnerable place. A cop with no name nor past, a slate wiped clean by a 2mm hole in the world."

Kim's face is carved from granite. "You forgot your sexuality because of _the pale_."

"No! I meant—I had an ex I nearly killed myself to forget, and I _did_ kill me but I _didn’t_ forget. And now I have _so many_ feelings and my brain is _too small_ to contain them, and I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about _mouths_ —”

“In general?”

“No, specifically.”

“Your ex’s,” Kim states flatly.

“No.”

This is it, the crash. The memory of ice hurtles towards Harry, blindingly white. Like oblivion, like the smell of apricots.

"My—my partner’s."

All the air is sucked out of the room, as if a pale seed had sprung up in Kim's modest 1-bedroom house. Harry wishes it would take him too, maybe it could manifest in his fucking brain stem and just end him already, because death would be preferable to this silence, this certain possibility that he's fucked the best thing in his miserable fuck-up life. Again.

Kim stares at the map of Jamrock. He doesn’t move, barely even looks like he’s breathing. 

Harry realises he’s technically propositioned a subordinate, and dies a little more inside. 

“Vicquemare?” Kim finally says.

Harry chokes back a noise that's half-scream-half-laugh-all-abject-misery.

"No, I thought not." Kim holds the coffee mug in a death grip, arm frozen at a perfect right-angle. "This would be hysterical if it weren't such a fucking disaster," he says, and squeezes his eyes shut. 

Seconds tick by. Harry can’t bear to look at Kim, but can’t bear to look anywhere else.

Kim exhales sharply through his nose. "I can try to guide you through your confusion, Harry, and answer any questions you might have." Something in him shifts, softens. He opens his eyes. "Fuck, I would've loved someone to have helped me. But that second part?" He shakes his head, looks sideways at Harry. "I can't." 

Harry nods. Knows what Kim is trying to say: cop code, Rule One. 

"Got it," Harry says, and chooses his next words carefully. "If you no longer feel comfortable working with me, Kim, I'd understand. We can go back to precinct and put in change-of-partner requests. If you want, instead, to go back to 57, well. I'd understand, too."

Kim turns back to the map and weighs these offers. He straightens a crooked photo, then clears his throat. 

"That will not be necessary,” he says, and locks eyes with Harry. "As long as we're both clear about our stances."

Harry nods again. Lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding. 

Kim returns a curt nod and his shoulders relax back to their ground state. "Who would I work with anyway? McLaine? Absolutely not. I'd run him over within a week."

"Hey, you might unlock his hidden potential. Or get him to stop stealing the station’s toilet paper."

Kim cradles his mug. "Not even Captain Pryce could get a confession out of Chester ‘3-ply’ McLaine." 

"What about Minot? She's green, but works smart and learns fast."

"Maybe so, but she's no human can opener." Kim gives him a slight smile, and Harry feels himself smiling back, properly this time, relief welling up inside him. 

"No, detective," Kim says. "I'm afraid you won't get rid of me that easily." 

"Then you’re still stuck with me, Kim."

"Jamrock's criminals quake in their boots." Kim adjusts his glasses. "Come, finish your coffee and we'll get back to the Kineema. I'll drive you home after."

Harry slurps his coffee. “This really is good.”

"I remain a free man."

\---

Eighteen days later, Harry stares up at a shipping container. It looms over him, the worn red of a wound, scabbing against the merciless blue sky.

Kim looks around the abandoned lot, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare. "I see no bottles, syringes, condoms, canisters, or any other evidence of juvenile delinquency,” he murmurs, “Why would someone dump a container here?”

"The report mentioned loud banging and shouting coming from the lot, right? Late last night," Harry says. 

Kim checks his notebook and nods. "It could be an illicit substances lab, but again," he sweeps his arm out like he's introducing the ragged chain link fence and cracked earth, "There's nothing here."

Patches of rust creep across the container's surface. If Harry concentrates he can almost hear the metal crumple and collapse in on itself, ground to dust. And that's the Pale, isn't it? A spreading rash on the world's skin, the re-membered past hollowing out the present. Time will flense from history, the symbol from the image, word from sound, meaning from being, until our atoms forget their bonds and we decay into spectacular nothing.

Something moves in his field of vision. It resolves into a hand, waving in front of his face. 

Harry blinks. The lieutenant leans towards him, concerned.

"Are you alright?" Kim asks, reaching for Harry's forehead. He stops, then clasps his hands behind his back instead. "Do you feel dizzy? Nauseous?"

"I'm okay." 

Kim shoots a look at the container. "Is it talking to you?" 

"Not really." Harry doesn't want to worry him.

Kim pushes up his glasses. "But you're intuiting _something_."

Harry stares back at the container. It's a big metal box. He runs a hand through his hair, then gathers it in a bunch above his sweaty nape. Just a big metal box.

“You can tell me, detective.” Kim’s voice is level, coaxing. “I will listen.”

Harry glances at his partner. Kim is giving him his full attention. 

"We stand at the precipice," Harry utters.

"What of?"

"A significance." He drops his arms to his side. There's a whisper at the edge of his hearing, but he can't catch the words. "Of cataclysmic size. We need to open the container."

Kim nods and places a hand on his holster. 

Harry reaches for the lock.

"Wait." Kim grabs Harry’s sleeve. "It's been under the sun for hours, so it’s going to be hot. Use your handkerchief."

"Oh yeah, thanks." He wraps his hand and settles it on the lock handle.

"Ready?" Harry says.

"Go," Kim says, eyes never leaving the container.

Harry pulls and the metal bar shrieks as it slides from its latch. He pries the doors open and raises the flashlight. The light beam hits the back of the container, illuminates bare walls and empty space. 

Kim wrinkles his nose. "Smell that?"

Harry sniffs. "Smells like old piss," he says. "I'm going in."

"I'll stay out here, so we both don't get trapped."

Harry steps into the container. It swelters, radiating heat thick enough to build a wall. He sweeps the flashlight across the floor—nothing—then to the ceiling, and he lights upon a grate.

"Hey, Kim, what do you make of this?" he calls over his shoulder. "Looks like a modification."

Kim crouches and cranes his head. "I think you're right. Move the beam to the left? Thank you. Yes, this was welded on. See how it connects to those?" Kim points at a nest of metal tubes wedged in the corner of the container. "This may be a rudimentary ventilation system."

"So whatever was being transported was live. Rare animals?"

The furrow between Kim's brows deepens. "I hope so, detective."

"Maybe it was horses," Harry says. He paces down the length of the container, counting on his fingers. "Chester said he once heard of an officer from another precinct who broke a horse smuggling ring." 

He reaches the back wall, pivots 90-degrees and paces again, restarting the count. "Some rich people were trying to breed the perfect racehorse."

"Surely it would be more economical to smuggle horse semen." Kim tracks Harry's pacing. "A standard container like this measures 2.5 by 12 meters."

"I was gonna ask. Because it's about 2.5 by 10 meters on the inside, by my count."

"So there's a secret compartment at the back."

Harry raps the back wall and it rings hollowly. "Cleverly built, too," he says. He stands in front of it, thinking. Plucks his drenched shirt-front from his skin.

"Any marks that indicate where a door could be?"

Harry shines the light on the floor, checks under his shoes. "Lotta scuff marks here. I can’t tell." He runs his free hand over the bottom half of the wall, feeling for a hinge, a button, anything. “You know Kim, this would go a lot faster if you’d get in here.”

"We can't risk both of us being in there at the same time. I'm happy to change places," Kim says, peering in. "Maybe you should come out anyway, it's dangerously hot."

“My investigative method cannot be rushed.”

“That’s what you told the Captain last week when he asked after our reports. Which _I’ll_ have to finish while the lazareth treats your _heat stroke_.”

“You would? I’ll buy you dinner.” 

Kim folds his arms. “You won’t be able to buy me _anything_ if you’re in the _hospital_.” 

“Eh, they’ve gotta have a gift shop.” Harry’s fingers find a round ring-handle, folded flat into the wall. “Found something,” he says, “Looks like a ring pull.” He tugs. “It’s not budging though.”

"Maybe it's locked? Try pushing and turning it."

Harry does and a section of the wall swings open, just large enough for an adult to crawl through. 

"Oh yeah, there we go. Nifty." 

He drops to his knees with a grunt and looks through it.

A face looks back. A fly crawls across a staring, sightless eye.

"Oh, fuck,” he whispers.

\---

Notes and Translations

  * 're-membered' is borrowed from Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved", where she uses 'rememory' to describe the recurrence of trauma and how it intrudes upon the present. [(For more info read this)](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/445257/pdf)
  * flense: to slice the skin or fat from (a carcass, especially that of a whale).




	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunstroke | A song | Juvenile delinquents | The Major Crimes Unit | Autopsies | A young woman speaks | The 8/81 at night | Car-talk

Harry’s almost made it out of the container when he collapses, the heat bearing down on him like a weight. He tries to push himself up, palms straining against the metal floor.

An arm braces his waist. Kim crouches next to him. 

“Bodies. I counted,” Harry says, forcing the words through his teeth.

“Later.” Kim slings one of Harry’s arms over his shoulders. “Can you walk?”

Harry feels his head begin to unspool from his body. “I’m fine,” he says, “didn’t even drop the flashlight.” 

Kim slowly raises them to a standing position. Harry takes a step but his legs ignore him, and he nearly drags them both to the ground.

“Easy,” Kim says, pulling Harry back on his feet. “Go slow.”

It's cooler outside the container, but not by much. They’re halfway across the lot when Harry hears a drum beat, faint and tinny, carried on the still air.

“Hear that, Kim?” Harry mutters, “Someone’s got a band together.”

Bleached grass crackles underfoot. A voice lifts in song.

“I don’t hear anything,” Kim says.

“It’s far away. Pretty.”

“What are they playing?” 

Harry concentrates. “Don’t recognise it. But sounds familiar. A remix?”

“Sounds _juvie_.”

“Everything you don’t like is juvie.”

“That’s not true,” Kim says, keeping Harry talking and therefore conscious. “Disco isn’t juvie.”

“If I wasn’t holding onto this flashlight, I’d arrest you for _criminally bad taste_.”

They bicker softly as Kim half-walks-half-drags them to the Kineema, parked in the lee of a crumbling tenement building. Kim maneuvers Harry into the driver’s basket and presses a button on the dashboard. 

Cold air blasts from the floor vents. Harry lifts his hair off his neck and leans into it, feeling it cool his face and prickle his sweaty scalp.

“Where’s your water canister?” Kim’s white tank sticks translucent to his skin, as if he’s been swimming. 

“Under the passenger seat.”

Kim crosses to the other door, reaches under the seat, and unearths a bottle flask. He shakes it—empty.

“Whoops, drank it all,” Harry says.

“We both know that is a lie.” Kim taps his canister against Harry’s knee. It sloshes. “Take mine.”

The water is warm—the same temperature as saliva—but Harry drinks anyway. 

Kim nods approvingly. He climbs into the passenger seat, takes his glasses off and thrusts his face over a vent. 

“How many bodies?” he asks, eyes closed.

“Fourteen.”

Kim inhales. “No survivors,” he says flatly. It’s a statement, not a question.

“None, I checked.”

“Fuck,” Kim breathes. He pinches the bridge of his nose, then rubs his hand down his face. “Did you manage to establish the cause of death?” He sags back into the seat.

Harry shakes his head. “Wanted to, but had to get out.”

“You did the right thing.” Kim restores his glasses and opens his eyes. “I’m going to radio the station. This is too big for the two of us.”

Harry sips more water. “If the container was dumped here, someone must’ve seen the truck. We can start interviewing while waiting for the rest of C-Wing.”

Kim nods and checks his watch. “It’s about four p.m. now. We shouldn’t go in there anyway, not until the hottest part of the day has passed.”

They huddle in the tenement’s long shadow. The container shimmers in the distance, a rust-red beast beached kilometres from water.

“After all, they’re not going to get more dead,” Kim says.

They share a look. 

“Deadady-dead-dead-dead,” Harry murmurs, holding out the canister.

Kim takes it, his fingertips brushing Harry’s. “Daba-doop-doop,” he says, and drinks.

\---

Their rounds yield a window of time when the container was dumped, the name of a hauling company, and a teenager who fails to act like he isn’t spectacularly high.

“Thanks for the visit, cop man,” says the teen who's introduced himself as Torque. He lolls against the door frame, pupils blown. “We’re just playing a wholesome, family-fun game of Suzerainty. Everything’s peachy.” He moves to shut the door.

“I love Suzerainty,” Harry says, wedging himself into the hallway. “Can I join you?”

Torque’s blissed-out expression is washed away by surprise. “Huh? No!”

“C’mon, I bet I could teach you a thing or two about the means of production. Unless,” Harry’s face hardens, “you’re lying to me, an officer of the law.”

“I-I-I’m not.”

“Great!” Harry beams. He shoulders past the sputtering teen and bounds into the apartment.

Anodic beats pulse from an ancient tape player. Teenagers are sprawled across the pocked floorboards and a ratty sofa, all staring open-mouthed at things swimming beyond three-dimensional space. A girl on the floor points at him. 

“What the fuck, Torque?” she says, struggling upright. “Why is my dad here?” Her acid green hair halos her head like a dandelion puff.

“Officer Du Bois of the RCM, off-duty. I heard there was a game of Suzerainty going.” Harry nudges a pile of discarded pill packets with his shoe. “I see you’re playing with the illicit goods expansion pack.”

Another teen, his ears bristling with piercings, tugs the green-haired girl’s sleeve. “Yo, Ditte, your dad’s a cop?”

She slaps his hand away. “No, shit-for-brains. He’s dead.” 

“Oh, sick. Sorry.”

“Officer, please.” Torque hovers at Harry’s elbow. “We’re not harming anyone. We’re just vibing, you know?” Sweat trickles down his clammy forehead and soaks the front of his tatty v-neck shirt. He’s rapidly descending from his high.

Harry winks at him. “No one’s getting in trouble over a board game.”

“Yeah. Shut up, Torque. I wanna talk to my dad.” She gazes at Harry, her eyes as dark and round as a calf’s. “What’re you doing here, dead dad?”

“Just checking up on you,” Harry says, “Making sure you’re okay.”

Her face breaks into a gapped-tooth grin, then collapses into a frown. “Who the fuck is that?” she says, pointing behind him.

Harry turns and sees the lieutenant standing in the hallway, arms clasped behind his back and one eyebrow arched above his glasses.

“I don’t see anyone, sweetheart,” Harry says, signalling Kim for a little more time.

Kim nods and spreads his arms theatrically. “Don’t mind me,” he addresses the teens, “I’m a hallucination.”

“Yo, Ditte,” Piercings whispers, “I can see him too. Are we in a group hallucination?”

“Don’t ask me, shitbird,” Green-hair snaps.

“Hey!” Piercings waves at Kim. “Hey, Seol-man! Are we in a group hallucination?!”

Kim rolls his eyes. “Yes. You are all incredibly high on the sickest, nastiest drugs.” His voice is devoid of any emotion. “Primo shit. Wow, what a score.”

“Sick.” Satisfied, Piercings sinks back into the sofa.

“I gotta ask, why are you cooped up here?” Harry jerks his thumb at the open window. “There’s a lot nearby that’s a perfect hangout spot.”

Torque blinks rapidly. “We don’t fuck with _that_ place, officer.”

“Yeah,” Green-hair chimes in, her words coming out in a rush. “The last container that got dropped there, we tried to break into it and—”

“ _You_ tried breaking into it,” Torque interrupts.

“Shut up, you held the bolt cutters. Anyways, we tried, but got run off by some bad dudes with machetes.” She shakes her head. “Scary shit.”

Harry nods. The tape player clicks as the track changes, and a stuttering bassline fills the room.

“So this isn’t the first time a container’s been dumped there.”

“Nope.” She bops her head in time to the new beat. “Not the second neither.”

“How many times has this happened?”

Green-hair attempts arithmetic. Synths thrum.

“Fifty?” she hazards.

“Maybe four times in the last couple of years, officer,” Torque says, bouncing on his heels as he thinks. “They’re dropped off at night and are disappeared by morning. This is the first one that hasn’t.”

“That’s what I said.” Green-hair sticks her tongue out at Torque.

Harry looks between the two teenagers. “These men who chased you, what did they look like?”

Torque scratches his collarbone. “Inked necks and full-sleeves, but not the usual gang stuff,” he says.

“They were big. Mean.” Green-hair’s eyes slide to Kim, writing in his notebook. “They looked like him,” she says.

“The Seolite man you’re all hallucinating?”

“Yeah.” Green-hair giggles and flops onto her side, then wrinkles her nose. “Can hallucinations write?”

The lieutenant underlines something and caps his pen. “Hallucinations do whatever they want to do.”

Harry claps, startling the teenagers. “Well, if a game of Suzerainty _isn’t_ starting soon, I should get back to work. Thank you, Torque,” he pats a damp shoulder, “you’ve been very helpful.”

Torque blinks and gives him a watery smile.

“Wait, Dad, you’ve just come back.” Green-hair pushes herself upright. “Don’t go.”

Harry hesitates, then lowers himself onto a knee.

“I have to, sweets. I’m sorry,” he says.

“I miss you.” She grabs his trouser hem. “Don’t go. Please.”

Harry glances down. Her nails are bitten to the quick, their black paint flaking. A little girl looks up at him, pale and anxious and lonely, her teenage bravado fallen all away.

“I’m always with you, Ditte. In here.” He taps his forehead, then his heart. “And you’re always with me, too.”

“So we’ll be together? Even when you go?” 

Harry nods. “In our memories.”

“Okay.” She tightens her grip. “Bye, Dad. Love you.”

“Right back at you.” 

Her hand slips off his trouser leg. Harry stands, smiling sadly.

“Yo, Ditte, are you _crying_?” Piercings gawps.

Green-hair sniffles and wipes her eyes. “Obviously, fuckstick.” 

Torque ushers them out and shuts the door.

“That was kind of you,” Kim says as they walk down the stairs.

“Kids aren’t so bad. They’ll surprise you if you let them.”

“I will not, detective.” He suppresses a shudder. “Fifteen years as a juvie cop was enough. But a possible connection to Seolite criminal enterprise, _that_ was a surprise.”

“Could those men have been from a different gang?”

Kim shakes his head. “Unlikely. The teenagers would’ve recognised their tattoos. I’m also told that Seolite gangs are insular. They don’t mix with other ethnicities.”

Harry holds the door open for Kim as they exit the building. “Did you ever run into them? At your old station.”

“I heard about cases, but they were never assigned to me.” Kim frowns. “To tell you the truth, I was likely shut out deliberately.”

“That’s stupid. The more I hear about 57, the stupider it gets.”

“There’s a reason why I transferred. 41 is much more collegial, despite the heavier caseload. Or because of it.” 

Kim cocks his head. A motorized whine cuts through the soggy heat, growing louder as it approaches them. “Speaking of—”

“Oi!” 

They turn. Jean Vicquemare leans out the window of his Coupris Forty, gilded in the evening sun.

“The hell are you doing away from the crime scene?” he rasps.

“Interviewing witnesses, detective.” Kim looks to Jean’s left and nods. “Evening, Minot.”

Judit smiles. “Evening, Lieutenant Kitsuragi. Harry. We’d offer to take you but,” she points at the barred, postcard-size grate mounted in the wall behind their seats, “Torson and McLaine are riding in the holding pen.”

“Where they belong,” Harry says.

Mack ‘the Torso’ Torson crams his face into the grate. “Fuck off, Harry!” he shouts.

His partner elbows him out of the way. “We can still hear you, asshole,” Chester says, eyebrows meeting like an angry mountain range.

“Thank you, _Lieutenant-Yefreitor_ ,” Jean says, eyes rolling. ‘Now they’re pissed.” He bangs the holding pen wall. “Settle down, boys! You can kick Harry’s ass when we get there.”

Kim squares his shoulders. “We’re parked around the corner. We’ll be right behind you.”

“Alright. We won’t touch anything.” Jean nods at Kim.

Through the grate, four hands flip Harry off. 

“Bet I could take both of them,” Harry says, while the motor carriage pulls away.

“I’m sure you could, but let’s not find out. Tonight’s going to be long enough.” Kim checks his watch. “We shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

\---

When the Kineema turns into the lot, Chester and Mack are kicking up dust clouds, still sulking, and they glower as Harry climbs out of the passenger seat. Chester blocks his way and spits, narrowly missing Harry’s snakeskin shoes. Mack looms behind him and rolls a meaty shoulder, abdominal muscles rippling under his mesh vest.

Leaning against the Forty, Jean and Judit watch. 

“Ten reál on Torson and McLaine,” he whispers to her.

“You’re on.” She slaps his proffered hand. “Fifteen on the lieutenant.”

Jean smirks. “You’re gonna lose this one. Harry’s a sack of potatoes.”

“Not Harry, Lieutenant Kitsuragi.”

“Calm,” Kim says, moving between the three men. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

“We don’t have any beef with you, Lieutenant,” Mack says, knuckles cracking like gunshots.

Chester balls his fists. “Yeah, just your dipshit partner.”

“Fourteen people are dead in there,” Kim says, his voice level enough to build a house on. 

Mack starts, whipping around to look at the container. 

Chester scowls. “You’re shitting me.”

“No.” Kim draws himself up, arrow-straight. “This is a big case, the kind that makes or breaks a department. We need to do our job, _officers_ , not scrap in abandoned lots like schoolchildren.”

“Yeah,” Harry pipes up, “let’s be adults.”

Kim nods. “Exactly. Apologise to them, detective.”

“Wha—” Harry turns to his partner, betrayed. “You’re supposed to be on _my_ side!”

Not a muscle in the lieutenant’s face moves. “I do not take sides. Now, apologise.”

Harry throws his arms in the air. “Fine! I take back what I said. Chester and Torso, you do not belong in the holding pen because you’re both valued members of C-Wing, and the sum total of your contributions is inestimable.”

The two men glance at each other.

“We weren’t, like, really gonna hit you.” Chester settles back into his habitual slouch.

Mack shoves his hands into his jean pockets. “We were just upset and chose an unhealthy way to express our feelings.”

“The fuck, Mack?” Chester says.

“What? I read.”

“Shit,” Jean mutters.

Judit nudges him and sticks out her hand, palm up. He fishes out his wallet, grumbling.

“Now that we’ve put our _m_ _achismo_ away, we have a case to solve. Vicquemare and Minot,” Kim waves them over, “Lieutenant Du Bois and I will be going into the container. Could you second us? Torson and McLaine, please assist by helping to carry out the bodies.”

“How long have they been here for?” Judit asks, tucking notes into her shirt pocket.

“The container was dumped two nights ago, around seven to nine p.m.,” Kim says.

Jean rubs his beard. “That’s a long time in the sun. It’d be murder.”

“Hah! Good one, Vic!” Chester hoots, then suddenly freezes.

“We tried investigating earlier, but it wasn’t safe,” Harry says, ignoring Chester struggling under the weight of Kim’s raised eyebrow. 

“The fuck are we standing around for, then?” Jean shoos them. “Get in there.”

Heat still radiates from the container and it engulfs them like a womb. Harry crawls into the compartment, carefully moving over the body that lies across its entrance.

“Watch out,” he says, and shines the flashlight over the threshold. “It’s cramped in here.”

Kim comes through and surveys the scene. The beam of light sweeps over the bodies slumped against the partition wall and crumpled in the corners of the container. They are all young and Seolite, and are beginning to bloat. Fat shiny blow-flies wriggle out of their slack mouths and taste the jelly of their eyes. There is the whiff of carrion.

The lieutenant snaps on a pair of latex gloves. “Please hold the flashlight, detective,” he says, kneeling by the body in the doorway. “Do you mind taking notes?” 

Harry clamps the flashlight between neck and shoulder, then flips to the red field autopsy forms in his ledger.

Kim places his hand on the dead man’s chest. A stillness flits over them like a bird taking wing. 

“Coroner’s case number: KK41-1608.1920,” he intones.

They work quickly. Harry asks and Kim answers, the list of boxes and fields a familiar litany.

“6. Race:”

“Seolite.”

“7. Sex:”

“Male.”

“8. Date of death:”

Gloved hands move over the body, checking the flex of its joints. “Rigor is present throughout. The ambient temperature is high though, so this may not be an accurate indicator.”

Kim rolls the body onto its stomach and lifts its shirt. Dark blotches pool across half its back, parallel to the spine, as if it had been turned on its side and dipped in wine. The lieutenant presses a blotch for a long moment. When he releases his thumb, a pale oval mark remains on the corpse’s skin, ringed in purple. 

“Lividity is pronounced but not fixed,” he says, “I’d estimate time of death to be about six hours ago.”

Harry writes today’s date and taps his pen on the form. “So, a couple of hours before we opened the container.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“If we’d arrived earlier we could’ve saved them.”

“This one, at least. Or given him a fighting chance.” He turns his head to his shoulder and pushes up his glasses. “Regret will not help him now, detective. 11. Evidence of treatment: None.”

The post-mortem continues. The lieutenant finds no evidence of strangulation or blunt force trauma, neither knife nor bullet wound, nor any of the other ways through which life is deliberately taken.

He examines the corpse’s hands. “Wrists are unmarked, no sign of restraints. Fingertips are bloodied. Nails are torn, some missing entirely.”

“That’ll be those.” Harry points the flashlight at the door. “Scratch marks on the inside, bloody.”

“It was locked from the outside.”

“And they were trapped.”

Kim sits back on his haunches. “Injury was antemortem and self-inflicted. Given environmental factors and the absence of any fatal injuries, hyperthermia is the most likely cause of death. Heat stroke.” He shakes his head, and moves his hand over the dead man’s eyes, closing them. “God, what a horrible way to go.”

Harry scribbles a final line and snaps his ledger shut. Thirteen more bodies lie beyond the flashlight’s beam. He sees them screaming, hurling themselves against the container’s walls, clawing at the door and trying to rip it off its hinges. They sink to the metal floor. The sun crests the sky. Heat wrings life from them.

“Think that’s the cause of death for all of them, Kim. Don’t see any other evidence of foul play,” Harry says. 

Kim pats the dead man’s trousers. “We’ll have to conduct the other autopsies to confirm that, but I agree. This isn’t murder, it’s a trafficking case.”

His fingers find something, a note in a pocket. He unfolds it. 

“What’s it say?” Harry peeks over Kim’s shoulder.

“It’s in Seolite. I can’t read it. But we’ll find someone who can.” Kim slips it into an evidence bag.

When they relay their findings to the rest of C-Wing, Jean insists on giving a second opinion. He goes in, Judit following. 

“Do you want a turn?” Harry says to Chester and Mack.

“Hell no,” Mack says, and crosses himself.

Chester thumbs his nose. “No thank you, El Tee. I actually wanna sleep tonight.”

“If we work efficiently, all of us will,” Kim says. “Once they come out, we’ll—”

Judit nearly barrels into Kim, a hand clamped over her mouth. She stumbles past the men and doubles over, retching. Her dinner spews onto the dry earth.

“Keep an eye on Vicquemare, detective,” Kim says, moving to check on her. 

“I’ll get her water canister,” Chester says.

Judit gulps for air. “I’m fine,” she says, and vomits again.

Mack offers her a pack of wet wipes.

Footsteps ring from the container. Jean emerges, draped in thunder. A muscle in his jaw twitches furiously.

“How’s Judit?” he asks, surprisingly gentle, trying to keep his temper in check. It billows like a tent in a gale, straining at its pegs.

“Keeping it together,” Harry says, watching Kim pat her back and murmur encouragement. Chester has returned with her canister, and she rinses her mouth.

“She’s good at that. Sometimes I forget that she’s only been trapped with us for, what, nine months?” Jean shoots her a thumbs-up, asking if she’s okay. 

Judit wipes her lips and raises her thumb.

Jean nods. “This container is fucked up shit,” he growls, folding his arms and glaring at Harry. “Trafficking? _Seolites?_ Please tell me you have leads.”

“Witnesses saw a truck from ‘Olympe Logistique’ turn out of the lot. There’s also a possible connection to a Seolite criminal gang.”

Jean grimaces. “Today keeps getting fucking rosier. How do these cases keep finding you?” His fingers dig into the meat of his bicep. “Why can’t we have something normal, like a double homicide? Are you some kind of fucked-up-shit-magnet?”

“I dunno. But this is kinda nice.”

“My ears have just heard something _incredibly stupid_ , but I’m gonna ignore them.”

“I meant,” Harry gestures at the two of them, ‘us talking about a case, you swearing at me—it feels familiar. Like old times.”

The muscle in Jean’s jaw twitches again. “Are we grandmothers at a fucking knitting circle?” he snarls. “How about we focus on the goddamn bodies?”

Clearing the container is slow work. The sun slinks below the horizon, slipping past clusters of Coalition airships and crimsoning their heavy bellies. Fourteen bodies are arranged in two neat rows. Flashlights flick on. Forms are filled. 

Harry peers into the mouth of a woman who’s barely out of her teens. Pearly teeth glisten. She won’t have any use for them now. He’s found no evidence of treatment, and everything suggests she'd succumbed to heat stroke, exactly like the other victims.

He jots down his conclusions and unrolls a body bag. The black plastic crinkles as he pulls it over the dead woman’s legs and up under her chin. Her half-lidded eyes watch the moon, soaring overhead. Harry picks grass from her hair. She looks like she could be sleeping, if he wanted to lie to himself. She looks far too young to be dead.

“Why did you get in there?” he asks.

“Why did you get your badge?” the dead woman answers. “To make something of yourself.”

“To be honest, I also needed the money.”

She wheezes, inert lungs expelling air. “So did I. We are little worker ants, making capital for our colony.”

“But why come all the way here? There aren’t many Seolites in Revachol.”

“ _Au contraire_.” Reproach glints in her glassy sclera. “We sew the shirts you wear, season the meals in your stomachs, and stock your kiosks with cola. Our invisible labour, noticeable only by its absence.”

“Your traffickers didn’t notice yours.”

“We’re blips. Rounding errors. Well within the margin of _acceptable risk_.” Her blue lips do not curl. 

“Your family must miss you.”

“Of course, already they rip themselves apart. But this will not affect you. Nor me.”

“We’ll find the people who did this,” he says, “I promise.”

“Thank you, officer. I hope you’ll live to not regret it.” She falls silent. 

Harry brushes her bangs from her forehead. Her skin is cold. He cradles her head and lets the body bag swallow her. Above them the moon waxes, as milky as a cataract.

“Another note, Lieutenant Kitsuragi. In Seolite too,” Judit calls out. She’s bent over the body of a young man with a shaved head. Jean kneels opposite her, supervising.

“Record where you found it and put it with the others,” Kim says, closing his notebook and slipping it into a pocket. He counts the black bags arrayed on the lot, massaging his right wrist.

“That’s most of the autopsies done,” he says. “We can start transporting them. Lieutenant Vicquemare, may we use your motor carriage?”

Jean’s head snaps up at the mention of his name. “You have your Kineema. Use _that_.”

“Our Forty has more space, Jean. It’ll save on trips,” Judit points out.

“Oh, so it’s _o_ _ur_ Forty now?”

Judit crosses her arms. “I stripped the engine and replaced all the wiring so, yes,” she says, calmly staring Jean down.

“Fine, fine, fine.” Jean throws Kim his keys. “Don’t do anything stupid. We’re still paying off Harry’s coastal stunt.”

“I said I was sorry!” Harry yells across the lot.

“Sorry won’t undock my fucking pay!” Jean yells back.

“You’re right though, Lieutenant,” Kim interjects before Harry can fire something back, “We should use both motor carriages. Torson, McLaine, could you drive the bagged bodies to Processing? We’ll finish up here and transport the rest ourselves.” 

He holds out the Kineema’s ignition key.

“Dibs!” Mack says, and grabs it. 

Kim pulls the bigger man to him, so close that their noses almost touch, and he stares Mack dead in the eye. 

“Stick to the speed limit, use the indicators, and maintain the recommended distance between yourself and the next vehicle. Come straight back, Sergeant, or _I will know,_ ” he says, soft as steel. His tone implies that he knows a great many things, chief among them how to kill a man _—_ painfully _—_ and dispose of his body, especially if said man should dent the Kineema. 

Mack is transfixed. He gulps, nods. 

Kim releases him.

Mack remains where he stands, arm extended straight out, leaning away from the key like it’s radioactive.

“Hey, Chester,” he says, “wanna swap?”

“Fuck no, get fucked.”

\---

“You really scared the shit outta Torso,” Harry says later, after they’ve ferried the remaining bodies to Processing. “I’ve never seen him more relieved to sit in the holding pen.”

Kim shrugs behind the wheel. “Someone had to remind him of traffic laws.” He switches lanes, indicator ticking. 

“I thought cops didn’t have to follow those.”

“Only in emergencies, detective.”

“But isn’t everything we do an emergency?”

“See, this is why _I_ drive.”

Harry huffs. “I’ll have you know I _aced_ my vehicle handling retest.”

“I heard. You broke the record for fastest time _and_ the examiner. I saw him in the lazareth after, gibbering about drift.” The lines around Kim’s eyes deepen, he’s smiling. “I’m still driving.”

“You’re impressed.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, you’re _definitely_ impressed.”

“And if I am?”

“One could say you’re—”

“Do _not_ _—_ ”

“ _K_ _im_ pressed.”

“You’re never driving my Kineema.” Kim presses his lips into a thin line, trying not to crack up.

“How about only in emergencies?”

Kim snorts and shakes his head. “You’re incorrigible.”

“That’s me,” Harry says, grinning.

They wind through the concrete coils of the 8/81, thrust above the glittering city. Tomorrow gathers at the night’s edges. In a few hours the sky will lighten, and the motorway will swell with vehicles into a great metal serpent, rippling from Martinaise to the Old South. For now it sleeps, and Revachol dreams. 

“How do you do that, anyway?” Harry points at his own eyes. “The eyebrow thing, and the glaring.”

“It’s a skill I cultivated at 57, so people would take me seriously.”

“Because they were kind of racist?”

“That, and how I could still pass as a teenager, aged thirty.” Fingers tap the steering wheel. “Being homo-sexual didn’t help.”

“They knew?”

“Probably. But I didn’t shout about it.” 

Kim switches lanes again, approaching the exit which will lead them straight through Jamrock’s heart. Harry looks out the window. A nest of squat brick buildings swims into view—Precinct 41, still lit, bustling with officers on the night shift.

“Do I need to tell them?” Harry says.

Kim glances at him. “No, Harry,” he says, gently. “You don’t owe anyone an explanation.”

“But if I wanted to, how would that work?”

“You tell as many people as you want, when you want. Or only a few people, or none at all. You have complete control over it.”

Harry nods and fidgets with his seat belt. A question turns in his mind. The shape of it pricks his tongue.

“Say what you’re thinking, detective,” Kim coaxes, “It’s okay.”

Harry takes a deep breath. “Why didn't you tell your old precinct?”

“Good question.” Kim shifts down gears as they leave the motorway. The Kineema cruises through the empty streets. The lieutenant considers his answer.

“It wasn’t safe,” he finally says. “They would’ve turned it against me, stripped my lieutenancy, or worse.”

“Do you think 41 will be the same?”

Kim’s mouth twists like he’s tasted something bitter. “I’ve learnt to pick my fights and shrink my expectations. I would prefer not to find out.” He glances at Harry again. “I do feel safe with you, though.”

“Same.” Harry smiles. 

Kim smiles back, lips quirked.

Want stirs in him. Harry looks out at slumbering Jamrock and counts the number of lit windows they pass. The feeling leaches away, seeps back into himself.

“What do you think about the case?” Kim asks.

Harry picks at his fingernails. “It’s big. Feels like Martinaise again.” 

“Yeah,” Kim sighs. ”I think so too.”

“Vic said I’m a magnet for fucked up shit.”

Kim furrows his brow. “You are no such thing. Cases arrive to us and we work them, as best as we’re able.”

“I dunno." Harry runs a hand through his hair. "I think he may be right. What if this stuff just follows me around? What if Revachol is leading me _to_ it?” He looks to the driver’s basket. “That makes me sound like I should be committed to an institution, doesn’t it.”

A passing street lamp illuminates Kim. For a moment, the sharp angles of his face are carved from light, and then it’s whisked away. 

“If you’d asked me six months ago, I would’ve said yes. But now? I trust your premonitions and intuition, detective, even if I don’t understand them.” He flips the indicator switch and turns onto Harry’s street. “Let them come, you’ll solve them like you always do.” Their eyes meet. “And I’ll be right by you.”

The Kineema coasts to a stop on the corner of Perdition and Main. 

Kim pulls the handbrake, clicking it into position. “Rest while you can. It’s going to be a long week.”

Harry doesn’t know how to respond. He undoes his seat belt, brain fizzing with directives— _thank him and cry / don’t cry stay cool / lean in and kiss him / raise your hand for an Ace’s High / nod professionally like a professional / KISS HIM you dumb idiot_ _—_

“See you tomorrow,” Harry says instead. “Drive safe.”

Kim tilts his head, the round rims of his lenses silvering. “Of course. It’s not an emergency,” he says, and winks.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Captain Pryce | The Diplomatic Trade Mission of Seol | Teamwork | Harry owes a debt | Consulting Special Consultant Trant Heidelstam

Captain Pryce is not pleased, and the day’s barely begun. He twirls a pen, sends it spinning round his thumb. Hundreds of reports spill out of the wall of filing cabinets behind him and onto the floor, heaped in neat stacks, and Harry knows that he’s read every single tan folder and corrected their spelling and grammar. With _relish._ The pads of his fingers are stained with ink.

According to Precinct lore, before joining the RCM, Pryce had trained as a literature teacher with a specialty in Naturalism and the Graadian novel, whichーto Harryーis a hair’s breadth from psychopathy. But maybe that’s why Pryce has managed to captain the 41st for so long. Handling a zoo of shit-flinging cops must be _easy_ after years of churning through turgid, oblique prose about lost pastorals and meteorological phenomena as metaphor for the breakdown of the human condition and/or the state. That, and the supreme confidence which comes with knowing how to use a semicolon.

One slim folder lies on Pryce’s desk. The pen makes another revolution. The Captain swivels in his chair and watches Harry, like a cat that’s spotted a mouse scurrying across the kitchen tiles. 

A little voice reminds him that he still owes Pryce a month’s worth of reports. Harry ignores it and stares at a point three-centimetres above the Captain’s left ear. If he stays quiet, he might survive this.

Kim breathes evenly next to him, fingers laced in his lap. _He’s_ finished all of his reports.

Pryce sucks his teeth. The pen stills. He’s about to say something when Jean and Judit burst through the door, sweaty and apologetic.

“Sorry, Captain,” Jean puffs. “We saw the damn couch-assholes again and gave chase.”

“Where were they this time?” Pryce says.

“Across the street from our garages, the fuckers. Lounging in _formal attire._ ”

“Brazen. Did you apprehend them?”

Judit shakes her head. “They were very quick.”

“Lifted the couch over their heads and fled like a goddamn giant cockroach,” Jean says.

The Captain taps his pen on his desk. “Next time, officers.” He motions to the two empty chairs next to Harry and Kim. “Take a seat.”

He opens the file. “I regret to inform you that news of the container has spread across the river. To the Diplomatic Trade Mission of Seol. They have no jurisdiction here in the International Zone, but they will be keeping a close eye on developments.”

Pryce slides the folder towards the assembled officers. Kim pulls out a letter, typed crisply on heavy paper. On either side of him, Harry and Judit lean over to examine it. A whiskered, four-taloned snake slithers across its bottom edge, mane and scales embossed in fine relief. Claws grip a red orb, raising it to the creature’s mouth. Its jaws are open in mid-roarーor swallow.

Jean slouches in his chair. “Will they get in the way?”

“Their Legate emphasised that your work will not be interfered with,” Pryce says, then sighs. “Worrying whether or not that’s a threat is above my paygrade.”

Judit looks quizzically at Pryce. “I thought Seol was isolationist. Why does it need an outpost here?”

“Isolationist states still need to conduct business,” the Captain says. “Capital flows across all borders, even through the Pale.”

“They’re making a big fuss about ‘extending the hand of friendship’ and ‘inter-isolary cooperation’,” Kim says, scanning the letter.

“That’s _exactly_ why I’m worried. Which is why I’ve called the four of you in to split the work. The sooner we solve this case, the better.” He points with his pen. “Du Bois and Kitsuragi, you take the lead. Vicquemare and Minot have volunteered to help.”

Jean jerks his head up. “We did _what_ ,” he growls at Judit, “we’re fucking _buried_ by our caseload.”

“We can spare a morning,” she says evenly.

He throws his hands in the air. “No one fucking tells me anything.”

Pryce tucks his pen behind his ear and steeples his fingers. “You’re being told now, Lieutenant.” He swivels to Kim and Harry. “What next?”

Kim pushes up his glasses. “We have two objectives. First, find the truck driver. Second, translate these.” He produces the evidence bag full of paper slips. “Notes in Seolite, found on the victims. My guess is that they’re addresses, and if so we’ll need to visit them.”

Pryce nods. “I saw the Special Consultant’s ostentatiously sensible motor carriage on my way in. He’d help.”

“Then I suggest Officers Vicquemare and Minot locate the driver while we follow the notes. Depending on where they lead us, interviews could take up the whole day,” Kim says.

“Works for us,” Judit says. “Right, Jean?”

Jean grumbles and tugs his beard, then nods.

“Wonderful. We are in accord.” Pryce raps his desk. “Vicquemare, Minot, don’t let me detain you. Du Bois and Kitsuragi, could I speak to you in private?” 

Jean and Judit file out, closing the door behind them.

Pryce settles back in his chair and resumes staring.

Harry’s eyes flick to the only ornamental thing on the desk, a framed drawing of two stick-men. The one with ferocious black slashes for eyebrows shouts, ‘FREZE RCM!!’ and points a gun at the other stick-man, who holds a bag of reál and says, ‘FUDGE’. The artist has given their masterpiece a title: DADDY AT WORK. bY NIKI age 4.

The silence is unbearable. It rings in his ears. He wishes Pryce would say something, anything, but the Captain just stares at him scrabbling for a bolthole, waiting.

Kim turns to look at him, eyebrow raised.

Harry cracks. “I’ll get the reports to you by nextー” 

“We’ll discuss that later,” Pryce says, and swigs coffee from a hot pink mug. ‘TON PÈRE’ is stamped across it in faded but legible letters.

The mug _clinks_ back onto the desk. “What’s your take on the case so far?”

“An interview conducted yesterday placed members of a seolite gang on the lot several months ago,” Kim says. “Given the resources and logistics required to traffick people across isolas, we can’t ignore a connection to Seolite organized crime.”

“Why not La Puta Madre?”

“Too much risk for questionable gain.” 

“Yeah,” Harry says. “If they wanted labour for their drug fields, that’s easily found here.”

Pryce plucks his pen from his ear and twirls it between his fingers. “So we’re looking at a gang that operates in Revachol and Seol.”

Kim nods. “Quite possibly.”

“Then it’s highly unlikely that the Trade Mission doesn’t know about this. Maybe they’ve even endorsed it.” The lines in the captain’s forehead deepen, and he sighs. “This doesn’t smell right. There’s a shell game happening, detectives. Follow the money not the ball, and be careful. Dismissed.” 

He picks the letter back up. “And Harry, I want your reports on my desk by next week. _No buts_ ,” he jabs an inky finger, “or you’re on record duty.”

Harry raises his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I’ll do them.”

“I mean it, Harrier.” Pryce raises his voice as Harry backs out of his office. “Those files need alphabetising!”

Sunlight pours into the main hall of Precinct 41. Steel beams stretch above them, holding up the domed roof like the fingers of a massive, long-extinct animal. Officers rove through the long room in twos and fours, chattering over the clacking of typewriter keys. Whatever the time of day, it’s always noisy.

They weave through the crowded station, heading for the jumble of desks which houses the Major Crimes Unit. 

“That’s my day off in the toilet,” Harry grumbles.

A laugh wafts from the break room. He glances at Kim.

“Don’t look at me, I’ve done my share.”

Harry clutches his heart. "Have you no charity for your fellow man?” 

Kim’s gaze is cool. “Detective, your puppy-eyes will not work on me.”

“Buy you a month’s worth of smokes.”

“Three.”

“A month and a half.”

“Three.”

“Two and dinner.”

“Three and dinner.”

“Deーhey, wait, you can't do that!"

“Are you in a position to negotiate?”

“Fine, three and dinner. You take all the fun out of bargaining.”

The lieutenant smirks. “I know my worth.”

The 41st has few interior walls, and each department jealously guards their fiefdom. C-Wing used to occupy prime territory by the central vaulted windows, Jamrock churning below them like a fetid sea. But in the rubble of Harry’s slow detonation, they’ve been reduced to a rump state, jammed between Traffic and Procurement in a dank, airless corner of the station. Mack and Chester had to launch a three-month-long guerrilla campaign to access the water cooler.

Special Consultant Trant Heidelstam is reading at his desk, which is really a repurposed classroom table, still scrawled with graffiti. Someone, probably him, has changed all the dick-and-balls doodles to happy faces. His seersucker suit gleams against its grimy surface.

He looks up from his book. A smile breaks across his handsome face, deepens his dimples. 

“Morning, lieutenants. You look like you’ve got something interesting for me.”

“We do.” Kim hands him the bag of notes. “How’s your Seolite?”

“Rudimentary, I’m afraid,” Trant says, fanning the notes out on his desk. “Seolite has three different writing systems and I’m only versed in one.” He holds up a note, the first one they found. “I can’t read this, for example. It uses characters I never got round to memorising.”

Harry takes the note from him and slips it into a jacket pocket. “How do you know this stuff?” 

“I lived next to a Seolite emigrée for a year, growing up. I’d pester him with questions everyday after school.” The memory makes him wince. “I must’ve been quite annoying. But he was happy to share his culture with me, and I was honoured to listen.” He chuckles sheepishly and shrugs. “We all went through an Oriental phase as youths, didn’t we?”

“I must still be in mine,” Kim says, face impassive.

A blush creeps across Trant’s cheeks. He coughs and looks down.

“Ah, _this_ is their phonetic writing script, which I can read.” He sounds out each syllable, finger moving below the line of characters. “4 Gesso Road, Apartment 22. These next few say the same, but it looks like all of these are addresses.”

Harry glances at his partner. “You were right, Kim.”

The lieutenant nods, pleased his hunch rang true. “Could you write the translations down for us?”

“Absolutely,” Trant says, eager to blot out his earlier faux pas. He reaches under the desk for a metal cylinder filled with perfectly-sharpened pencils, and dislodges a packet of menthol cigarettes. Its bright yellow-and-green packaging peeks out between his books and papers.

Harry’s fingers twitch.

Kim shoots him a look and shakes his head. 

Harry puts his hands behind his back, feigning innocence. He turns his attention to a mass of cobwebs cottoned to the ceiling corner. Flies struggle within them.

“Anything else you need, lieutenants?” Trant finishes the last note with a flourish.

Kim gathers them back into the bag. “Not right now. Thanks for your help.”

Harry doesn't steal Trant’s cigarettes. Kim prefers unflavoured ones.

\---

Notes & Translations

  * Seol is a big blank slate in-game, and as an Asian person I am obliged to fill it.
  * The four-taloned snake is, of course, 龙ーthe Chinese/East Asian dragon
  * The Seolite writing system is based off Japanese's syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) and the split between traditional/simplified Chinese characters.
  * TON PÈRE = YOUR FATHER, a gift to Pryce by Niki, age 15.
  * Shorter chapter this time because of irl commitments.
  * Ask me what the title of Pryce's dissertation was.




	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chasing leads | Kim takes point | A notification | The lieutenant and the Mountain | Big Mole | Stereo-investigation | Dumplings | Difference

The notes lead them to a pre-revolutionary housing estate on the outskirts of Villalobos. A monstrous C-shaped tower block hugs the earth, blackened by decades of industrial fallout and neglect, monument to an ambitious real estate project by now-extinguished Indotribe Welter. It was supposed to have been a city-within-a-city, a charming mixed-use development where couples could stroll arm-in-arm by an artificial lake, smiling indulgently as their little blonde Frédérics and Mathildes threw rocks at swans. But only one phase had been completed before the Revolution swept through Revachol, and construction was terminally stalled. 

A second tower block lies incomplete, ripped open, skewered on concrete stilts which would have ramped it over the lake. People still live in it, spending whole lifetimes creeping through its rebar ribs. The lake is dry now, filled with garbage. Mangy strays root through the festering heaps. Windows are stacked like coffins.

The slam of the Kineema’s doors rings across the courtyard. 

Kim shields his eyes and scans the block. His orange bomber jacket blazes in the noon sunーa warning shot. 

The estate holds its breath.

“It’s too quiet,” he says.

“Probably heard us coming from ten kilometres out,” Harry says. “Will your souped-up seven-point-two litre V12 be safe here?”

“It won’t be more secure anywhere else.” He holds out the bag of notes. “All of our addresses are located in this estate. Lead the way, detective.”

The first three doors they knock on are a bust. No one answers the first. The second gives way to an apartment occupied only by damp and mould, plaster sloughing off the ceiling in sheets. Someone opens the third, one dark eye and a sliver of tanned skin peeking out under the door chain. But when they see Harry towering over them, smiling with all his teeth, they shut the door in his face.

“Sorry for scaring you, ma’am or sir,” he shouts through the door. “We just want to ask some questions.”

A radio playing somewhere further down the hall is cut off. Silence rushes in.

“You’re not in trouble,” he tries to shout reassuringly. He hears footsteps skittering away, then a loud scrape as something is pushed against the door, blocking it.

Harry knocks again, harder, and the flimsy wood judders in its frame. He could break it down if he wanted toー _superstar cop, bring some_ **_policing_ ** _to this tenement. with your_ **_fist_ ** _and_ **_gun_**

“Maybe you should take the lead, Kim,” he says, shaking off the urge.

“Me? Why?”

“Because you look like them.”

Kim narrows his eyes.

“I’m not trying to be funny, sorry.” Harry gestures at all 180-centimetres and 94-kilograms of himself. “I’m spooking them. They may be more willing to talk if they see a Seolite face first.”

“Half-Seolite,” Kim says. Then he exhales sharply through his nose and takes the notes back.

The next few addresses go slightly better. With Kim in the lead, they’re let into cramped hallways or living rooms humid with damp laundry, but their inability to speak Seolite prevents them from getting much further. 

A slight young woman fidgets in a decaying kitchenette, one bare foot curled round the ankle of the other. If she could slip through the cracked tiles and disappear, she would. Instead, she nods frantically as Kim speaks, eyes darting between the two police officers. 

“Are you originally from Seol?” the lieutenant asks.

“Yes,” she says, hugging herself.

“Do you know anything about people being transported in shipping containers?”

“Yes.” 

Kim uncaps his pen. “A container was found yesterday. Do you know anything about it?”

“Yes.”

Harry perks up. “Do you know who runs them?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Got a name? Address? Anything?”

She shrinks from his sudden attention. Kim glances at him, eyes saying _Hold on, detective_. 

The lieutenant points out the window. “Is it raining right now?” His blue motor carriage bakes in the heat.

“Yes.”

“Who would win in a fight, Contact Mike or Stepan the Despicable?”

“Yes.”

He snaps his notebook shut. “She doesn’t understand our questions.” 

She nods at him. A weak smile wobbles on her lips. Harry notices her glance to the left, at a closed door.

“She’s hiding something,” he says. “Should I check?”

“Might as well be thorough.”

Harry steps towards the door. The woman jerks forward to stop him, but Kim intercepts, warning her back.

The handle squeaks as Harry turns it. The door falls open, and two faces stare up at him, cowering on the closet floor. A boy in ragged shorts, no older than five, clings to an old woman. She strokes his black hair, trying to soothe him despite the fear mounting in her eyes. The shelves are bare except for some cans of food and a half-empty sack of rice. A frayed wire dangles above them, shorn of its bulb.

“Hello,” Harry says. “Don’t be scared.” He extends a hand.

The old woman flinches away and the boy buries his face in her neck.

“Please,” the young woman whispers. “Please, no take.” 

She turns, trembling, to the lieutenant, and begins to unbutton her dress.

Quick as lightning, Kim stills her wrists.

“No.” He shakes his head. “No take.”

The young woman goes limp with relief. In the closet, the boy whimpers, and his grandmother curls her body around him and shushes. Harry hesitates, still holding the knob, unsure what to do.

Kim lets go of her and clears his throat. “Myーour apologies, Miss.” He pats his pockets and holds out the note with her address. “Please. I’m afraid we found it on a body.”

The young woman reads it, confusion pinching her face. “Body?”

“A dead person. Dead.” He crosses himself. 

Her mouth goes slack. “Dead man?”

“Yes.” Kim nods. “Dead man. We are very sorry.”

The note flutters to the grubby tiles and she sinks with it, clutching her stomach. Kim crouches next to her and takes out a set of forms.

“You may claim the body at the coroner’s office, here.” He circles the address printed at the top of the page. His tone is kind, icy professionalism melted all away. “We are in the middle of an investigation, so the best time to go would be two weeks from today.” He writes a date and circles it too. “Please bring this form with you. I’ll fill it in for you now.” 

His pen scritches against the yellow paper. The lieutenant treats the form with the same care and attention he gives his Kineema, ticking boxes and printing answers in his meticulous handwriting. Harry watches, wanders down the sweep of his forehead and the serious set of his mouth. Feels light trickle into his fucked-up brainー _you’re compromised, officer / abso-fucking-lutely bananas / you’ll ruin him, don’t_

\---

Outside, Kim sorts through the notes, his back and shoulders pulled as taut as a garrote. 

“We’re halfway through,” Harry encourages.

“More than,” Kim says, controlling the pitch of his voice. “The next address appears on several of these. It’s Apartment 22.”

“Hopefully it’ll go better than this one.”

The lieutenant looks up, bars of fluorescent light skimming over his lenses. He considers a brown stain pooling in the ceiling above them.

“It’s not their fault, detective,” he says, “they’ve been ill-used.”

They trudge through airless corridors. Harry replays the last thing he saw before shutting the door: the old woman standing, balancing the boy on her hip, reaching for her sobbing girl. Kim is also distracted, still running through what happenedーwhat the young woman had offered and its implications. 

“Why’d you give them paperwork they can’t read?” Harry says.

“Because her family has the right to claim their relative’s body. Closure is important.”

“So shouldn’t we be leading with the death notification?”

“You saw what happened. She was in no condition to talk after I’d broken the news. That’s why I’m keeping it in reserve.”

Harry steps over a doll, left to fend for itself by its fleeing owner. “And it’s also information that could pressure them into opening up.”

“It could give us an advantage, yes.”

“Why have they been so cagey, anyway? We’re just doing our job.”

“They’re probably expecting us to ask for a bribe, or worse. Because they think we’re going to arrest them.”

“Can we? If they’ve come here in containers?”

Kim pauses as the corridor splits into two. Screwed into the wall is a rusting sign. He checks it, then turns left.

“It’s a grey area,” he says. “Immigration control is not our responsibility, so if they haven’t committed a crime, then the RCM technically doesn’t have the mandate. But if we issue an interview request or bring them in for questioning, they’ll be logged into our system. Which makes it easier for them to be found by those who _do_.”

“Then they may not know their rights. Especially if they don’t speak Suresne.”

“That’s true.” The lieutenant frowns. He broods over this point like a hound worrying a bone. 

Even though the complex is falling apart, its central stairwell is well-kept and free of the trash which normally litters an estate of this size. Someone is even optimistically trying to grow flowers in the deep-set windows. Pale green shoots struggle to raise their heads from the dirt. 

Harry sticks his head over the handrails. Stairs spiral upwards, seemingly forever.

“What floor do we want, Kim?” The question echoes.

“Tenth.”

“Fuck. Why’s Apartment 22 on the tenth floor?”

“Poor design.”

They climb. On the third-floor landing, Harry loosens his tie. On the fifth, he takes off his blazer, the back of his shirt soaked through. Kim asks if he wants to rest on the eighth, bomber jacket wilting on his arm, but Harry shakes his head and grimly marches on. When they finally reach the tenth, they’re both panting, dripping, and cursing the lack of a working elevator.

“I need a breather,” Kim puffs, and lowers himself onto a step. Harry sprawls next to him, ribcage clanging.

“Can I ask you something?” Harry says.

Kim takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. “Shoot.”

“Why don’t you speak Seolite?”

“Why _should_ I?” the lieutenant fires back. “I have no interest in ever going to Seol.”

“But wouldn’t you have learnt it in school?” Harry taps his knee, trying to remember his student days. “Would it even have been taught? I have no idea.”

“It’s not. I had no opportunity to learn it because my foster mother didn’t speak it. Second language acquisition wasn’t a priority anyway, survival was.” 

“I heard things were really bad after the Revolution.”

“They were. And school was the worst.” He picks at his jacket, gripped by a sudden memory. Without his glasses, the lieutenant looks vulnerable, colour swiped across his high cheekbones, and Harry can see the memory winding its way out, settling heavy on his tongue.

“I used to get beaten everyday,” Kim says. “The other kids would ambush me in the street, pelt me with rocks and garbage, call me ‘monkey’ and ‘yellow faggot’.” He says the words without inflection, tasting them without relish. He’s bigger now. Older. They can’t hurt him anymore.

Harry thinks about patting Kim’s arm, but doesn’t. “Where was your foster mother?” he asks, gently. 

“Trying to keep my foster siblings from overdosing.” The lieutenant restores his glasses. “I don’t resent her. She was just one woman.”

“Did you fight back?”

“I’d run, which gave them exactly what they wanted. A chase.” 

“If I’d been there, I would’ve whipped them.” 

“That would’ve only encouraged them.” The lieutenant tries to hide it butーfondness lights on the corners of his eyesーhe’s flattered. “They only stopped when an RCM officer moved in next to us, and he’d escort me to school and back. Patrol Officer Malet. Mountain, I’d call him, because he looked like one.”

“Sounds like he left an impression on you.” Harry leans back on his hands. 

“I was a scrawny orphan who asked too many questions. He didn’t have to be kind to me, but he was. He’d let me sit in his motor carriage and press all the buttons, and when I was tall enough to reach the pedals, he taught me how to drive.” Sadness flashes through Kim like a fish turning in water, then he snaps back to neutral. “He was a good man.”

“What happened to him?”

“Fatally stabbed in ‘23 while attempting to stop an assault.”

They sit with this knowledge. Outside the window the carcass of a tower block is spiked above the overgrown lake bed. Long grass whispers. Grey light filters in.

Harry breaks the silence. “So then what happened, those kids started bullying you again?”

“No,” Kim says, standing. “By that time I’d gotten a reputation for fighting dirty. Mountain also taught me some tricks.” He offers a hand.

“This isn’t one of them, right?” 

“You’ll find out.”

Harry grins and takes it. “So is Officer Mountain why you joined?” 

“One of the reasons.” Kim pulls him up. “The RCM was a stabilizing force after the Revolution, and I wanted to be a part of it. To make Revachol better. What about you, why did you join?”

“I also wanted to make a difference. But,” he gestures to the building crumbling around them, “I don’t know if it’s working.”

“We do our best, detective. Day by day. That’s the work.” A breeze stirs the hair above his temples but Kim’s conviction is immovable. Lodged bone-deep.

Harry nods and slowly puts his arms through his blazer. Sees trembling fingers pushing a button through its clasp, and two people huddling in a barren closet, pale with fright.

He can’t shake them. “Some officers are taking advantage, Kim,” he says.

“I think so too. We need to root them out.” The lieutenant slings his jacket on and adjusts his collar. “I’ll bring it up with Pryce.” 

Harry stares at his partner like he’s sprouted a second head. “You’ll talk to him? _Willingly?”_

“We have fortnightly meetings. He’s not that scary, detective.”

“I’m _not_ scared of Pryce. My life is just easier if I avoid him completely.” He yanks the door open, holding it for Kim. “What do you talk about, the best pen makers? How to be professional 24/7? _Literature?"_

“Mostly you.” A ghost of a smile. “The captain also wants to improve the training junior officers receive, and we’re discussing how best to implement that.”

“But you’re terrible with kids.”

“No, I don’t want to deal with delinquents. There’s a difference.”

“Oh, come on. You must’ve had a phase. No Revacholian teenager learns that much about motor carriages without being _hands-on_.”

“Here we are, Apartment 22.” 

Kim stops at a heavy wooden door and knocks, red paint flaking off on his knuckles. A stocky middle-aged woman flings it open and fills the doorway, her broad shoulders recalling oxen straining at their yoke. A large mole buds from her chin.

She glares at Kim and snaps something in Seolite.

“RCM,” the lieutenant responds, flashing his badge. “May we come in?”

Big Mole blinks and glances at the white rectangle on his sleeve, then at Harry drifting into view like an iceberg.

“Sorry, officer,” she says, retreating. “Thought you someone else.”

This apartment is bigger and brighter than the others they’ve seen. Sunlight pierces the half-shuttered blinds, striping an altar and a statue of a crowned woman carved from white marble. She holds a spray of paper blossoms in her left hand. A four-taloned snake coils up her right forearm and lays its whiskered head on her outstretched palm. Three oranges, pitted with green mould, decay on a plate before her.

In the middle of the room, Big Mole sits on a table. Her hands grip its edge, where they can see them. The air is still. Suffocating.

“Ask your questions,” she says.

“How did you know we were going to?” Harry says.

She snorts. “RCM never come unless they have questions. Ask.”

Harry points. “Who’s she?”

The woman glances to her right, at the statue. “Eum-O-Ma. Mother of Seol.”

“Is she the Seolite Dolores Dei?”

“No.” Her upper lip curls. “Bullets prove your Innocence human. _These_ questions you ask?”

“Have you always lived in Revachol, madam?” Kim says, taking over. Harry drifts away to examine the altar.

"I come five years ago. From Seol,” she says, eyes tracking Harry.

“And this is your apartment.”

“Yes.”

“For how long have you lived at this address?”

Her boot taps the dusty tiles. “Five years.”

“What would she think about these oranges?” Harry interrupts, and prods one. It collapses, more mould than fruit.

Big Mole tilts her head, parsing his question. “Very hard to find fresh orange,” she says, regret shading her voice. Then she shrugs. "Eum-O-Ma remember, but forgive.”

“We are investigating a shipping container that was abandoned yesterday evening,” Kim says, noting her wobble. “Do you know anything about it?”

She shrugs, meaty shoulders moving under her shirt. “Big city. Many things happen.”

The lieutenant produces a note. “Read this, please. Out loud.”

“4 Gesso Road, Apartment 22,” she says reluctantly.

“That is the address of this apartment, correct?”

“Yes.”

Harry faces her, boxing her in. “Your apartment.”

“We found it at the crime scene,” Kim says, taking up the conversational baton. “On several bodies.”

“Trafficked from Seol to Revachol.”

“With nothing but the clothes on their backs and your address.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t know.” Big mole squares her broad shoulders and levels a stare at Kim, her body cocked like a loaded gun. 

Harry shifts his weight and readies himself for violence, but the lieutenant holds his ground. He stares back, unblinking, pen poised above his notebook. 

His command is a whip crack. “Swear on Eum-O-Ma.”

“No,” she growls, and looks to the altar.

The white statue watches from its perch. Shadows slip over its delicate face. Sweet rot wafts.

Big Mole hisses a curse and lowers her eyes.

“Arrivers need work. I find for them.” Her heavy brows meet. “Last time only one or two come. I help them. Then they tell their friends and family back home, and then _they_ tell _their_ friends and family. Now many come to me.”

On a low cabinet next to the altar, Harry finds a thick leather bound book. He flips it open. Columns of Seolite characters and numbers fill the pages.

Kim resumes writing. “What sort of work do you find?” 

“Restaurant, farm, driver, cleaner...” she shrugs. “Anything. If got money, they work.”

“Is this where you keep your records?” Harry lifts the ledger. 

“Yes.”

He draws a finger down a column. “If these numbers are reál, You’re making a lot of money from this.” 

“My people I ask token price only. Businesses I charge more.”

“Is their employment legal?”

“Businesses check paper. Not me.”

Kim turns to a new page. “How did you come to Revachol?”

She doesn’t answer. She folds her arms, expression unreadable.

“We don’t want you,” Harry says, coaxing a wounded animal from a trap. “Just the people in charge.”

Fingers drum against a taut bicep. She assesses him, bullish neck glistening with sweat. Then she turns to the wooden slats which bar the window.

“Container,” she says.

With clipped sentences, she details how the containers are organised by the Black Dragon Triad, a criminal organisation that operates mainly out of Grand Couron but have recruitment agents in Seol. Her passage cost more than a year’s worth of wages, and she worked her way through the triad’s web of gambling dens, brothels, and bars before finally striking out on her own. When asked about names and aliases, she shudders, and tells them about a mob boss known only as the Red Talon, whose appetite for money is secondary only to his cruelty.

As they’re about to leave, Big Mole stops them and takes a plastic card from her back pocket. 

“My sister disappear two weeks ago,” she says. “Can help?”

A pretty young woman gazes from the card, cupid’s bow lips curved in a smile which stops at her eyes. ‘EMPLOYMENT PASS: AUTHORISED EXCHANGE’ is lettered above her, white on cornflower blue.

“Not much of a familial resemblance,” Harry says.

“Same mother, different father.”

“What happened before she disappeared?”

“We fight. Over money. She want to leave, I tell her no, but she go anyway.” She rubs her face, looking suddenly tired. “I ask all my contacts. No one see her. I think maybe she go to employment agency, but how to find work? Her visa with me.”

“Why do you have it?”

“She give me for safe-keeping.” 

“Why does _she_ have a card and you don’t?”

“I save money to buy. Container too hard for her.” She sighs. “I am older. Stronger. I protect her, but I cannot go find her. If I don’t have paper, they send me back to Seol.”

The lieutenant stops scribbling. “The agencies have that authority?” he says, eyebrow arched.

“No, Seol immigration police. They everytime try to catch us. So we live here.” She raps the table. “Far from everything.” 

“What would happen to you if you were sent back?” Harry says.

Her tongue runs over her teeth. “Camp.”

\---

They’re back in the central stairwell, heading to their last address. Kim examines the card as they walk, tilting it to the light. A hologram glints. Iridescent talons grip an orb.

“Is this a wild goose chase or a stereo-investigation?” he says. 

“It’s a multi-channel, 360-degree orchestra of crime, baby.”

Kim pockets it. "My favourite.” 

“Do you know how your grandparents got to Revachol?” Harry asks as they climb another goddamn flight of stairs. 

“I don’t know the full story,” Kim says. “Everyone I could have asked is dead. There’s only what I’ve managed to glean from the Census Bureau…” He trails off, lost in thought. “Many things were consumed in the Revolution: records, histories, familiesーmine included.”

“Do you remember your parents?”

“A little.” Their footsteps echo and the lieutenant does not elaborate. This memory is his and his alone. “What about you, do you remember yours?”

Harry casts his mind back. “Not really.” He shrugs, and looks over his shoulder at Kim. “I guess we’re two men without histories, huh.”

“I’d rather focus on the present. And the investigation.”

As they near the landing, Kim suddenly asks, “Does it bother you, not having your memory?”

“Not really. I don’t know what I can’t remember.”

“Fair point. What about the things you do?”

Harry hauls himself up the last few steps and stops, catching his breath. “They feel like me and also not-me. It’s kinda freeing. If you could reset your life, would you? Without the, you know.” He knocks his own skull. “Massive brain trauma.” 

The lieutenant rests a couple of steps below, one red glove braced against the wall. He’s thought about it, Harry’s blithe journey through the world, newly-born at forty-four. Life without history. It tempts him. It would be _easy_. His gaze settles on the planter box by his head.

“No,” Kim answers, “it would feel like dying.” He touches a green shoot. “I’m not brave enough.”

“You’re plenty brave,” Harry says. “Or at least not an idiot like me. You can actually talk to Pryce.”

“You’re selling yourself short, detective. You’re not the one who’s been talked into redeveloping the entire junior officer program.” Kim pushes his glasses up and smiles.

_compromised / bananas / don’t_

\---

Kim knocks on their last door and a young man with a shaved head opens it. He spots the white rectangle and lets the lieutenant in before he can even flash his badge.

“I have paper,” Cue Ball blurts as he backs into his apartment. “You want to see? I can take.”

“There’s no need,” Kim says, stepping over the threshold. Harry follows behind.

Cue Ball gulps.

“This is Detective Du Bois, my partner,” Kim calmly explains. “No one’s in trouble. We just want to ask you some questions.”

Cue Ball looks even more nervous.

Something delicious is simmering on the stove. A large round table is squeezed into the kitchenette. On it is a bowl of pink mince flecked with green, a stack of small floured circles, a cup of water, and a tray of dumplings. 

You have what questions?” the young man says, toes curled beneath him.

Harry points at the dumplings. “How do you make those?”

“You… want to watch me make?” He looks very confused.

Harry shrugs. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”

Wary of this new interrogation method, Cue Ball sits at the table and peels a dough circle from the stack. He lays it flat on his palm and spoons filling into its centre, then wets its circumference and begins to fold, crimping the edges. He holds the finished dumpling out to the detectives, a fat little crescent moon.

Harry sits on the stool opposite him. “Can I try?” he says, rolling up his sleeves. 

The young man nods. Harry teases a circle from the stack and reaches for the spoon. 

The lieutenant joins them. “Feel free to continue,” he says, opening his notebook. “We can talk and fold at the same time. Have you always lived in Revachol?” 

Cue Ball shakes his head, peeling more dough. “I come here from Seol eight years ago.”

“And how did you come here?”

“I fly. I leave Seol forever. More money here.” He scoops meat. “More opportunity.”

“Do you still have family in Seol?”

“Yes. One day I hope they join me. I work for that day.”

Harry watches the young man shape the dumpling, then mimics his movements, carefully folding and pinching. He sticks the tip of his tongue out in concentration.

Kim presents the employment pass. “Do you have one of these?”

“No. I have Seol exit permit and Revachol papers.”

“How much did your flight and permits cost?”

“Five-year wages.”

Harry whistles. “How did you afford that?”

“My whole family work. Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunties, parents.”

“Wait, it cost five years of your _entire family’s_ income?”

“Yes. I work to repay them.” A dumpling is placed on the tray. It ripples, exactly like the others. 

Harry appraises his own lumpy dumpling, inexpertly shaped by thick fingers. “Mine’s terrible,” he says, setting it down.

“Next one better,” Cue Ball says and peels off two dough circles.

Behind him, the door to the next room slowly opens. A gaggle of children peek through the crack, eyes huge, all staring at Harry making dumplings. One of them waves, chewing her pigtails.

Harry waves back. 

The young man whips around and shoos them back into the room. The door clicks shut.

“Six kids, huh?” Harry says. “They must be a handful.”

“Not all mine. Neighbours’. I look after when they work.”

“Are any of them yours?”

He hesitates, water dripping from his fingertips. “One girl.”

“Oh, the one who waved. She’s cute as a button.”

The room dims as a cloud obscures the sun. The young man folds and avoids their eyes.

“Let’s get back to our questions,” Kim says. “Are there other ways of leaving Seol?”

Another dumpling hits the tray. “No,” Cue Ball says.

“Have you heard about people leaving Seol in containers?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Have you heard of a criminal organisation called the Black Dragon Triad?”

“No, I stay away.”

“A container containing fourteen bodies was found yesterday evening. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

The spoon scrapes the bottom of the bowl. “No.”

“Then why did we find your address on the body of a woman?”

Cue Ball stops in mid-fold, blood draining from his face. He stares at the half-made dumpling, pink mince gaping between white skin like an open sore. The pot sputters on the stove, lid clanking.

“I don’t know,” he finally answers, lowering it. His hands tremble as he flattens them against the table.

“We want to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Harry says, concern creeping into his voice. He picks up the dumpling and finishes crimping it. “Think about your daughter.”

“She born here,” Cue Ball says to the table, hands clenching into fists. “She has paper. She _vacholiere._ She _never_ go in there.”

“We meant that any information you have may be crucial to our investigation, especially if you know something about these containers,” Kim says, trying to smooth things over. 

“Why you keep asking? I told you, I don’t know.”

Harry dusts his hands. “The RCM wants to protectー”

“RCM protect themselves! Last month my neighbour got robbed for five reál, and now? Cannot walk. You police, where were you, huh?”

The lieutenant draws himself up and flips to a new page in his notebook. “I’m truly sorry to hear that. We can open a case file for him if you give us his addressー”

“So you go disturb him about paper and containers? I give you fuck nothing.”

Kim raises a glove. “Sir, if you calm down weー”

“Calm down? Calm down?! You think you better than me, police? You born here?” The stool skids as he slams his fists and lunges across to snarl in Kim’s face. “You forget where you come from, youー” he spits a phrase, harsh and guttural, and Harry doesn’t need to speak Seolite to know it’s a slur.

Harry rises like a boxer from his corner, nearly a head taller and thirty kilograms heavier than his opponent, and leans his full weight on the table.

“Sit down,” he rumbles. 

Cue Ball draws back but doesn’t sit. Defiance sparks through him like an electric current. 

The lieutenant regards them impassively. Only the tension carried by his lower eyelids gives him awayーhe knows exactly what he’s been called.

“Please leave,” Cue Ball says.

“You knew the woman in the container,” Harry insists. “Why was she there?”

“No more questions.”

“If you continue to be uncooperative, we will be forced to bring you in.”

“I know law. No crime in this house, so no more questions. Please go.”

The pot on the stove bubbles over. Fire spits, hissing orange. Cue Ball swears and leaps to it, cuts the gas.

Kim tucks his notebook away. “Thank you for your time.”

\---

Their drive back is quiet. The Kineema inches down the motorway, caught in rush hour traffic. Harry drums his fingers against his thigh, trying to work out the beat of the song he heard yesterday at the abandoned lot. 

“Do you want the radio?” Kim says, already moving to the dial.

A motor carriage behind them bleats, and its complaint is picked up by a shrieking chorus of other horns.

“Nah,” Harry says. “We’ve got a symphony.”

They creep forward, coasting in first gear. The lieutenant keeps his eyes on the road, holding the wheel at 10 and 2, thinking. 

Harry watches him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kim answers.

“What that bald guy said, does that happen often?”

“Usually, it’s the opposite. Some comedian will think I don’t speak Suresne, or I’m not Revacholian.”

“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have asked you to take the lead. I’m sorry.”

Kim meets his eyes, then flicks back to the carriages ahead. “No need to apologise. It yielded important information and a stereo-investigation. Getting sworn at is part of the job, and a reminder that to the Seolite community, I’m different.” The Kineema darts forward and cuts off another driver trying to overtake them. “Fundamentally.” He sounds almost proud.

“You mean you’re not like them.”

”No, I’m not.”

\---

Notes and Translations 

\- Eum-O-Ma is based on Guan Yin, Buddhist Bodhisattva. She is also revered as a goddess in Chinese communities throughout East and South-East Asia.  
\- This chapter is low on jokes. The next will have more, and be lighter in general.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Databases | Vicquemare and Minot have a lead | Vespertine Cop Shows | Smoke break | Knowing | Contact Mike dispenses advice | The day starts well | Calling cards

“No joy, lieutenants,” Jules Pideu says when they swing by the communications desk. One blue headphone rides high on his temple. “Our databases have nothing on the ‘Black Dragon Triad’ nor for ‘Red Talon’.” 

“What about the ICP?” Harry says. “They keep tabs on everyone, so they gotta have something on an interisolary criminal organisation.”

“I tried. Their database informed me that the Captain would need to authenticate my requestーin writingーbefore they could send me the preliminary forms I’d need to _start_ applying for access.”

“Which is Moralintern for ‘Fuck off.’”

“Exactly, sir. I’ve initiated the process of course, but it may take weeks to complete.”

The lieutenant frowns, hands on his hips. “Strange. It’s not usually this difficult. Could you patch me through to the 57th?”

“Of course.” 

Kim settles the headphones over his ears and leans into the microphone. “Good evening, Alice, Lieutenant Kitsuragi here.” His lips quirk. “I’m doing well, thanks. The stories about the 41st’s caseload are not exaggerated. But I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, could you pull up anything related to Seolite gang activity? I don’t have a specific case number but they should be tagged in our system.” 

The lieutenant’s blue notebook appears in his hands and he fishes in his pockets for a pen. Harry slides a pencil over and he nods his thanks. Blue-jacketed officers stream through the station’s swinging doors behind him, joking, arguing, and gossiping. 

“There’s nothing?” Surprise climbs in his voice. “Yes, please check again.” 

Harry nudges Pideu. “That’s not normal, is it?”

“Not at all, sir.” The lines in his worn face deepen. 

Kim quirks an eyebrow at the two of themー _something’s up._ “No need to apologize, Alice. Thank you, take care.” He pulls the headset off. “No records found. She sounded as shocked as I was.”

“Could the ICP have deleted them?” Harry says.

“RCM databases are maintained internally,” Kim says, “independent of the ICP.”

Pideu drums his fingers. “But political interference is not unheard of. It’s highly irregular,” he continues as the lieutenant glances at him curiously, “but years ago, a gang of young men rampaged through Coal City. They were hunting people. For sport. Officers traced them back to addresses in Stella Maris, and thenー” 

The station buzzes in the pause of his words. “The case was taken away and the officers were stonewalled. Some higher-ups in the Coalition Government stepped in and threw their weight around, apparently. Coffee-corner talk said that they were related to the men.”

“Wait,” Harry says, “I thought they didn’t operate here. That’s the whole point of the International Zone.”

“The Coalition Government leases us the right to police Revachol, sir. That’s how they can apply political pressure,” Pideu says.

Harry folds his arms. “So there’s, what, a Seolite conspiracy to hide whatever they’re doing in Revachol and the Moralintern are just letting them?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Kim says evenly, but he makes a note. “What we do know is, information that was once available now no longer exists. Seol appears to be a black box.”

“We’ll it break open,” Harry says. “Through good old-fashioned policing.”

Kim tucks the pencil into Harry’s blazer pocket. “So we will.” 

\---

Jean and Judit have better news, in the form of a tan folder hard-won from the logistics company.

“They send this trucker out to greet us,” Jean rasps, sat on his desk. “Huge guy, legs like tree trunks, looks like he could flip our motor carriage. He tells us to fuck off, then Judit sticks her head out the window and goes,” he flings his arms wide, “‘Loulou! How is your Mama, is her leg better?’ and he rolls onto his back like a pussycat.” He chuckles like a father recounting their child’s game-winning rugby try.

“I used to tutor him in school. He’s a nice boy, really. But terrible at fractions.” Judit pushes her hair behind her ears, embarrassed. “Anyway, we gained access to their logbooks and this is the only driver who could’ve transported the container.”

The lieutenant leafs through the assembled documents and stops at a reproduction of a union card. “Karl Song,” he reads. “Did you find an address?”

“His cab was spotless, our databases had nothing, and his union doesn’t keep personal information in case _we_ come sniffing around.” Jean’s heels thump against his desk. “Clever bastards.”

“Very.” Kim passes Harry the copier paper.

A middle-aged Seolite man is printed on the page in fuzzy black-and-white. His mouth hangs slightly open, as if he’d been startled by the camera flash. What’s left of his hair creeps up the crown of his head like moss on a boulder.

“Why him and not someone else?” Harry says.

“He’s the only one who has a block of time that’s unaccounted for,” Judit explains, “and it matches the timeframe for when the container was dumped.”

Jean jerks a thumb at the folder. “That’s his personal log in there, every delivery he’s made since the beginning of the year. Took some persuading to get. Their records guy was tight-lipped until Judit worked her magic.”

“Did you also tutor him in math?” Harry asks her.

“Chemistry and physics,” she says to her shoes.

“You’re way too smart to be a cop.”

Jean snorts. “Spoken like a real _gym teacher,_ Harry.”

“Hey!” Harry says. “Teaching gym needs _specialist knowledge._ Ask me what the largest muscle in the body is.”

“Fine. What’s the largest muscle in the body?”

“That,” Harry raises a finger, “would be the brain.”

Kim looks down at the folder, hiding a laugh. “Good try, detective.” 

\---

Harry steps back from Kim’s map of Jamrock, now criss-crossed with red string, the remnants of previous cases stored away. 

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he says, admiring his handiwork. “Like a Vespertine cop show.”

“With fewer fire fights, hopefully,” Kim says.

“But the cops always escape unharmed in the end, by shooting the guns out of the bad guys’ hands or at something heavy hanging conveniently overhead.”

“Or the fatal bullet is stopped by their badge, cigarette lighter, or pocket-sized religious text.” Kim shakes his head. “I’d rather not rely on luck to survive a shoot-out.”

The lieutenant examines the driver’s path through Jamrock. “So, Mr. Song started at the harbor,” Kim points at a string leading off the map, ”delivered a shipment to this depot on the outskirts of Couron, and then there’s a lapse of several hours before he’s back at the logistics company.”

“Which is plenty of time for him to drive here,” Harry taps the abandoned lot, “unhook the container, and leave.”

“Right,” Kim nods. “And we’ve identified four other similar deliveries he’s made in the last year, each beginning at the harbour and passing through that depot. Assuming that those were also trafficking containers, the triad is moving quite a high volume of people into Revachol.”

“And this is the first mistake they’ve made.”

“That we know of. There may have been others.”

Harry rubs his mutton chops. “Buried in a container yard, dumped in the wilderness, sunk to the bottom of the oceanー”

“Swallowed by the Pale.” Kim says quietly, picking at the ribbed cuff of his bomber. He changes the subject. “Looks like Couron is our next stop."

“We should check those employment agencies as well. See if they’ve seen our missing woman.”

The lieutenant hits his palm. “That’s what I forgot to take! I have a card for one at my desk.”

“You’re switching careers?” Harry says with a start. “Don’t leave us, Kim. 41 would fall apart without you.”

Kim clasps his hands behind his back. “Detective,” he soothes, “the precinct is bigger than one lieutenant. And no, I have no intention of ever leaving.”

Relieved, Harry looks back to the map. The streets they patrol wind through the district like veins over muscle, and at Grand Couron, the thin black lines straighten into a grid of long avenues and cross streets. A pin glints below it in an industrial estate. Red string scores it like a welt.

“What should we name the case?” Harry says.

“Nothing I’m coming up with sounds appropriate,” Kim says.

Harry mentally strikes off OOPS, ALL BODIES. “How about THE FUCKED CONTAINER?"

“Maybe just THE CONTAINER.”

“Or just FUCKED?”

“Catchy, but too broad.” Kim pulls a string taut and tightens its knot. “You’re right though, it _is_ fucked. Let’s go with your original suggestion.”

Harry writes it in the casefile, scoring two lines under ‘FUCKED’. He looks up and catches Kim watching him. 

“Something on your mind?” Harry says.

The lieutenant turns away. “It’s nothing.”

“You had your thinking face on. Like this.” Harry presses his lips together and squints.

“You look like you need the bathroom.”

Harry squints harder. 

“That is a spectacularly poor impression of me.”

Harry clasps his hands behind him. “I’m Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, ace cop. I solve crime with my big brain.”

“This is inane.” A grin fights its way across the lieutenant’s face. Then he puffs his cheeks out and drawls, “I’m Harry Du Bois. Disco disco disco, Kras Mazov!”

“Detective, where is your uniform? You are breaking all of the RCM’s regulations!”

“I’d do something about it but I’m too busy collecting tare!”

“What was that? I can’t hear you over my super cool and super illegally modified engine!”

“Wow, that’s so juvie! I _love_ being juvie, I’m a rebel.” Kim thrusts both middle fingers at the ceiling. “Fuck you, fuck me, fuck the world! We live in a toilet and everything is shit!”

Harry bursts into laughter and doubles over. Kim begins to laugh too, his chest heaving silently.

“Okay, that was a pretty good one of me,” Harry says, wiping his eyes. “But seriously, what’s eating you?”

Kim adjusts his glasses, smile fading. “This case is. I normally don’t put stock into my gut feelings, but.” His attention wanders back to the map.

“Something isn’t sitting right?”

“No. Not since this afternoon.” He traces a string. “Cases usually have clear endpoints. We find the person or people who’ve committed the crime, arrest them, write the report and send them to court. But for this one?” His fingers rest on the pin for the abandoned lot, where the string terminates. “I don’t know what we’ll find if we keep pulling. I doubt it’ll be anything good.”

He sighs heavily and pushes the pin into the board. “Time for a break. I’m calling in your debt.”

Harry tosses over his smokes.

“Thank you.” The lieutenant plucks a cigarette from the pack and waggles the rest. “You’re welcome to join me.”

“So generous,” Harry says, reaching for it.

They smoke by the open window, ashtray placed between them. Kim perches on the sill, one leg drawn up and the other dangling. Harry sits on a chair.

“So,” Harry says.

“So,” Kim says.

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

Kim blows smoke out the window. “Sure. But I may not answer.”

“Aw, c’mon. Answering one little question won’t make you uncool.”

“It’s not a matter of ‘cool’.” The lieutenant leans back and drapes an arm over his raised knee, cigarette smouldering between finger and thumb.

“Now you’re being _extra cool_ on purpose.”

“I am being myself," he smirks. “Go ahead.”

Harry points at the motor carriage prints hanging by the door. “Those are nice. Did you get them?”

"Ah." Kim shakes his head. "I don't have the eye for interior decoration."

Harry slaps his thigh. "I knew it! Who did?"

"My former partner."

"From 57?"

"I thought you said only one question. And before you _‘Aw c'mon’_ me," he cuts off Harry's protests with a wave, "I've given you a second one for free."

Harry takes a drag. "Alright, let's trade. Ask _me_ a question, about anything."

“That’s not how it works.”

“There’s gotta be _something_ you want to know. I’ll answer as best as I can.” He raises his left hand and crosses his index and middle fingers. “Cryptozoologist’s honour.”

Kim crooks an eyebrow. “Hmm. We _are_ getting serious.” 

A motor carriage speeds past, asphalt grinding beneath its wheels. There _is_ a question, a squirming curiosity. Harry waits for it to wriggle out.

The lieutenant raises his cigarette to his lips. “What happened between you and your ex?”

“Straight for the jugular, Kim.”

“You don’t have to answer.”

“And not get my answers? Absolutely not happening.” Harry sucks the rest of his cigarette down, an orange flare in the dark room.

“We met young, fell in love, and it soured,” Harry says, smoke billowing out of the corner of his mouth. “We limped along for years but thought children would save us. She lost two pregnancies. I responded by drinking and snorting everything I could get my hands on. Then she left me, found a richer man who cherished her and followed him to Mirova. _Et voilà."_ He gestures at himself like he’s performed a mediocre magic trick. “Here I am.” 

He remembers Dora, shivering in a sudden chill. He loops his scarf under her chin and holds her hands to warm them. She’s soft, resplendent, and like a sunflower tracking the light she tilts her mouth to his, green eyes flecked with joy. He tastes apricots. And everything is new.

“We were beautiful,” Harry says. Then he crushes his dog-end and shakes another cigarette out of the packet. “It didn’t last.” 

He pats his pockets. There’s a _flick_ and Kim offers his lighter, glove cupped around the flame. 

“Thanks.” Harry leans in. Paper and tobacco catch.

“Was she your first?” The lighter vanishes.

Smoke trails out the window. “The first who mattered. I tried seeing other people after it all went to shit. Nothing. Obviously." Harry flicks ash into the tray. “Between the drugs, the drink, and the complete mental breakdown, I was a catch you'd throw back into the sea.”

“Do you still think of her?”

“Hey, I'm up an answer. Your turn.”

“We’re tied by my count.”

“You're in deficit. You gave me your second for free, remember?” Harry winks.

A smile tugs the corners of Kim’s mouth. “So I did. To answer your previous question then, no. My ex-boyfriend—who was _not_ from 57—bought them.”

“Why is he your ex?”

Kim looks away, onto the street. The rooms of the house opposite glow with warm yellow light. Shadows flit behind the curtains. Music slips out under the half-cracked window. 

“I couldn’t give him what he wanted—a regular life,” he sighs. “As I'm sure you know,” he nods at the map of Jamrock, “our work follows us home. So he took the cat and left me those prints and the sofa cover.”

“I didn’t know you had a cat.”

“Chou-fleur was really his cat. She pre-dated me. Does a leading statement count as a question?”

Harry shrugs. “Eh, who’s counting.”

“I am. You owe me one answer.”

Harry runs a hand through his hair, then rubs the back of his neck. “I dream about her every week.”

Kim’s eyebrows shoot up.

“The same dream each time, the day she left Revachol forever. It used to happen every night and it felt like the first time, everytime, can you imagine? And even now she’s the only thing I can remember, _really_ remember.” He exhales, smoke coiling from his nostrils. “No wonder I went crazy. _Am_ crazy."

A dog barks somewhere in the distance. The lieutenant files this information away, his new theoretical model of Harry’s brain clicking into place. 

Harry watches him. His cheekbones are lovely. He wants to touch them. 

Instead, he leans out the window and blows a smoke ring. Kim draws the last of his cigarette and puffs one of his own. They watch the rings hang together in the still night air, not quite touching. 

"Do you remember the phasmid?" Harry says.

"Of course." Kim stubs his end and pushes the ashtray over. "You licked it."

"It told me to turn away from her, from the ruin. For the working class." Harry smiles wryly. "And it was like," he shifts in his seat, “a switch flipped from present to past. It still hurts like a motherfucker, but I don't wanna crawl into a hole and die.”

Kim nods, gazing out the window. He sees the phasmid too, mandibles bubbling as it unfurls from the reeds like an alien flower, its many glimmering eyes lowering to Harry’s. 

"It was impossible. And magnificent," Kim murmurs.

Harry blows another smoke ring. "It was my miracle."

Kim nods again, watching the ring hollow to its gentle collapse. He's seeing past the phasmid now, past Martinaise's scarred and battered coast, over the Insulidian Sea and into the Pale. History crests over him, bearing its full weight down on the present. 

“I thought _he_ was mine,” Kim says, “at the start. But I know now that relationships don’t run on miracles.” He hugs his drawn-up leg. In the low light he looks suddenly young, the familiar creases in his forehead and cheeks smoothed away. 

“Do you ever think you’ll die alone?” He stares out the window.

Harry fills his lungs with smoke. “Daily.” His breath trickles out of him. “Shot, stabbed, head smashed in, heart attack, rammed by a motor carriage, the Captain finally getting sick of my bullshit—” 

That gets a chuckle out of Kim. 

“—and we loop back to ‘shot’.”

“Being a cop is dangerous,” Kim says, raising his chin. “We should get hazard pay.”

“Suggest that and Payroll would definitely shoot you. But they’d have to go through _me._ ” Harry realises that he _means it_ and the knowledge rings in him like a bell. 

Kim looks at him. Something glimmers behind his lenses. “You’ve saved me once already, detective.”

“You did as well, digging out that bullet.”

Kim shrugs. “Eh, who’s counting?” he mimics. 

Harry stubs his cigarette and smiles. “We’re square.” 

Kim smiles back, and his gaze wanders down Harry’s nose and settles on his mouth. He slumps against the window frame. Then flicks his eyes up, meeting his partner’s.

The sill stretches between them, a no man’s land. Harry wants to wade across and take Kim by the shoulders, to crush their mouths together and cradle his lovely cheekbones.

He stands. 

“It’s late. I should get going.”

“I’ll get my keys,” Kim says, stifling a yawn. 

“You shouldn’t drive if you’re tired.”

“Now _that’s_ a good impression of me. Although—” Kim glances at his sofa and hesitates, the offer to spend the night piling up behind his teeth.

If they were two colleagues in an intimate-but-platonic relationship, Harry would’ve stayed. But he doesn’t know _what_ they are, only where they cannot go. It engulfs them, this great unsaid thing, wraps them in its coils and squeezes the breath from them.

He really wants to stay. But it’s not a good idea.

“It’s okay. I’ll walk.”

“That’ll take you hours.” Kim slides off the sill. “I’ll drive.”

\---

Harry sweats into his fold-out bed. His fan has been broken for weeks, and no breeze comes through the open window. _the ideal temperature for sleep is 18-22 degrees centigrade / you need a drink / did Kim want to kiss you??? / stop. think cool thoughts_

He grips his 6-month sobriety coin and imagines ice clinking against glass, whisky pooling—no, fuck. Condensation dewing on a bottle, crisp snap of the cap, hiss of pilsner foaming to the lip—god-fucking-damn it. He kicks his boxers off, flings them across the room and flops back down completely naked. This brings no relief. 

He stares at the poster taped to the wall opposite. Contact Mike stares back, baby blue boxing gloves guarding his chin.

 _the lieutenant gave you the eye! you should’ve kissed him! / that’s unprofessional / oh yeah, he_ **_wanted_ ** _to get unprofessional / no, you were still on duty / but he drove you back to his place / he does that all the time / you were 5 meters away from the bedroom! / he made his boundaries very clear on your last visit / he doesn’t know what he wants_ —

“ _I_ want a drink,” he announces to the apartment.

The coin bites into his palm. “Don’t you fucking dare, Harrier Du Bois,” it shrieks.

“I won’t,” he says, and heaves himself off the bed. He fills a glass from the kitchen faucet, then leans over and pours it over himself. Cool, blessed, water runs down his hair and neck, pattering into the metal sink like rain. He fills the glass again and pads back to bed. Its springs squeak as he sits heavily down.

Harry sips water and eyes the poster. “What do you think, Contact Mike? Should I have kissed Kim?” 

The great boxer’s printed visage scowls in bloody-minded determination. “Champ,” he barks, “what’s the difference between our beloved sport and a public execution?”

“Uh.” Harry scratches his chest. “A firing squad?”

“No! Consent!” Contact Mike’s yellow mouthguard glistens with spit. “When I went three rounds with Max ‘The Vespertine Viper’ Schott in the Grand Couron Arena, were we forced to fight? No! We chose to be there! To meet mano a mano, two titans toe-to-toe!”

“Okay, but I’m pretty sure Kim wanted to kiss me.”

“Pretty sure or certain?”

“Uh, pretty sure? There was this feeling I guess? I dunno.”

“A _feeling_ ain’t good enough, champ! Lemme ask you something. Would ten thousand voices have chanted our names if we weren’t sure we wanted to be there? Would they have screamed and applauded everytime we collapsed back in our corners, bodies bloodied but wills unbroken? No! Consent is _enthusiastic!_ We _wanted_ to fight! And we fought with _passion._ ”

“I get what you mean,” Harry sets the glass on the floor. “I should only kiss him if he makes it clear that he _wants_ to be kissed.”

“That’s it, champ, you’re learning! But that’s only round two, we have one more to go!”

The bed creaks as Harry settles onto the thin mattress. “Hit me.”

“Good joke!” Contact Mike is still scowling. “Last question. When my right hook smashed The Viper’s jaw and he finally dropped, did I keep punching him?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Exactly! I extended a sportsmanlike hand and helped him back onto his feet. Consent can be revoked at anytime, champ! Even if the person has given it before.”

“That’s good to know,” Harry yawns. “Thanks. I’ve learned a lot today.”

“You’re very welcome. Like I always said, the real fight—”

“Is for the right attitude.” His eyes droop closed. “Goodnight, Contact Mike. You’re a role model.”

“Sleep tight, champ.”

\---

A motorised whine tears through his dreams and Harry snaps awake. The arms of his alarm clock glare at him, accusatory and mute. 

“Shitshitshit _shit._ ” He bolts out of bed, accidentally kicks the glass, and watches it tip over in slow motion and shatter on the floor.

“You _stupid fuck,_ ” he hisses, carefully picking his way through wet shards to his clothes, heaped on a chair next to his empty closet. He throws on stuff that’s probably clean, jams his feet into his shoes and runs out the door, shirt flapping open and tie hanging down his back.

Halfway down the stairs, Harry stops and slaps himself. “Piece of idiot _shit._ ” He barges back into his sad flat and grabs his gun. “Go back to cop school,” he mutters as he slings his arms through his shoulder holster and secures it to his belt. “Fucking red-nosed clown cop.”

When he finally barrels out of the building, the lieutenant is waiting for him, leaning against the Kineema’s door, looking cool. Harry has spent his whole life—or what he can remember of it—flushed and sweaty regardless of weather, but Kim _always_ looks cool. The _bastard._

The lieutenant holds up a bottle flask. “You left this under the seat. Catch.” The metal canister turns in the air, cap-down like a diver arcing into a pool. It’s a clean throw. Easily caught.

Harry whiffs, manages somehow to flip its clasp open, and coffee floods down his front. He stands there dripping, empty flask wedged in the crook of his elbow. 

“Ah, shit.” 

Kim stares in horror. “Fuck! I’m so sorry, Harry.” 

“It’s fine, it’s fine. Good thing it was cold.” He sets the flask down and plucks his ruined shirt. “I gotta change. But I think this was my last clean shirt.”

“Hold on, I might have something.” Kim unlatches a panel under the steering wheel and rummages in the storage compartment. “This might be in your size. Ca—” he stops, then walks up and shoves a T-shirt into Harry’s hands.

Harry unrolls it. Two very busty and very naked blondes make out on a speeding motor-scooter, which is on fire. One blonde makes a lewd gesture, also on fire. Below them, trailing from their flaming vehicle, huge fiery letters scream ‘SPEEDFREAKS FM’. 

"Why do you have this in your work vehicle?" Harry asks.

The lieutenant’s expression is unreadable. "For emergencies."

“Yeah, okay, but did you call in and win it or something?"

"I have no idea what you mean.” 

Harry gives up on this line of questioning and scrutinises the T-shirt. “They look like they’re gonna swallow each other whole.” 

“Count their hands.” 

“One, two, three, where’s—OH." Harry raises the shirt to the morning light and whistles. "Wow. She fit a whole hand up there.” 

He flips to the back and, yep, more fire, same women. This time one of them is upside down, her yellow head tucked between her co-rider’s thighs. Their mouths are busy. He admires their technique and athleticism, then side-eyes his partner. 

“Lieutenant, I don’t think this is work appropriate.”

“Button your blazer,” Kim says, calmly meeting his eyes. “It’ll be less, well. Less.” The rims of his ears redden. He’s blushing.

“It’s been years since I could.” Harry shimmies out of his jacket and yanks off his tie. “Could you hang on to this for a second?” he says, holding out his holster. 

Kim accepts it wordlessly. Harry starts undoing buttons.

“Shouldn’t you change inside?” Kim says.

“The elevator is broken and I’m not going up all those stairs unless I have to.” He peels off his shirt and dabs himself dry as best as he can. The sun warms his clammy skin.

The lieutenant stands stock-still, hewn from stone. Harry notices how Kim stares up at the tenement and does not look at him. Deliberately. With _great effort._ His ears are burning even redder.

Harry turns the graphic T-shirt inside-out and pulls it on. “Thanks,” he says, gently lifting his holster out of Kim’s hands. 

The lieutenant risks a glance, sees Harry adjusting the lapels of his blazer, and relaxes. “You’re welcome. Let’s go, we’re late.”

Harry thinks about Kim’s ears all the way to the station.

\---

Jean is going over his case notes when they file in, mug of black coffee steaming on his desk. He nods at the lieutenant’s ‘Good morning’, then squints at Harry’s wave and levels a pen at his chest.

“Your shirt’s inside-out,” he says.

“I am testing a new investigative method,” Harry says.

Jean rolls his eyes and swivels to Kim. “How do you deal with his bullshit?”

“We must always be open to new and experimental methods of detection, officer.” The lieutenant’s face is carefully wiped of any emotion.

Fury gathers between Jean’s brows and clenches his jaw. “You two are getting pretty cosy, huh? Like tree and a fucking strangler fig—”

“Jean!” Judit tears down the main passageway towards them, dodging a herd of traffic cops. “The couch-assholes are back! They’re in a truck parked on the motorway!” She points to the central windows. “We can _see_ them from the station!”

Jean leaps from his chair “Those smug _pricks._ ” He takes a step, then stops to glare at them. 

“He’ll break your heart one day, Kitsuragi,” he growls, “he _always_ does.”

Judit cocks her head. “What’s going on—”

“Nothing,” he snaps, and takes off.

“Hey!” She sprints after him.

Harry watches Jean shove his way through the crowd of gawking officers. “What’s gotten into him today?”

“I believe Detective Vicquemare feels like he’s been replaced,” Kim says, flipping through an old notebook. “You’d been partners for years, and then I transferred. Where did I put the damn thing?”

Harry opens the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. “Maybe here,” he says, and lifts out a box. “The calling-card graveyard. What colour was it?” 

“Plain white. Black text.”

Harry shakes the box, tossing the cards. “That’s all of these.”

“Yes, it was distinctive.” Kim rifles through their casefiles.

Harry tips the cards onto his desk. He sits and begins sorting through them. Some are yellowed with age, others stained by coffee or some unspeakable fluid—why do they have so many? A thought occurs to him.

“Hey, Kim.”

The lieutenant peers over Harry’s shoulder. “Did you find it?” 

“No, but, do you think,” Harry lowers his voice. “Do you think Jean and I… you know.” He makes a fist with his left hand, sticks his right index finger in it, and pumps.

“I wouldn’t know. Maybe you should talk to him.” The lieutenant’s tone could freeze the sea.

He plucks a card from the pile. “This is it,” he says, showing it to Harry. 

A single line in Seolite is stamped on it. Black slashes tangent off straight lines and curves curl towards each other, arranging themselves into a sequence of characters. Harry thinks they almost look like faces.

He is suddenly aware of Kim leaning over him, so close that if Harry turned his head he could kiss Kim’s cheek. He chooses instead to sit still, every hair tuned to the lieutenant’s slight warmth and the rise and fall of his chest.

Kim flips the card over. “62 Rue Chantereine, Grand Couron,” he reads.

“Time for a road trip,” Harry says, and sweeps the rest of the cards back into the box.

Notes 

\- The ICP stands for the International Collaboration Police, mentioned in-game as an interisolary policing organisation run by the Moralintern. Kind of like Elysium’s INTERPOL.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grand Couron | Employment solutions | Harry tries a pastry | A Hikawa-sho man | Yellow grates | Private meeting | Not Mazovian Economics | Hounds and tigers

Couron’s towers gleam by the river, wrapped in sky. Crouched in their shadows are rows of handsome townhouses, tan sandstone facades painstakingly restored in the boom years after the Revolution. Trees spread their green canopies over the long boulevards.

62 Rue Chaunterine yields the addresses of several other agencies and little else. Working their way down the list, Harry and Kim find themselves facing a wall of wood and paper screens in the foyer of their fifth agency. A small floor fountain burbles in the corner, water running over a pink marble sphere.

“Where’s the door?” Harry says, trying to find a handle.

“I believe this is it. And that,” Kim gestures at a large gong hanging from an elaborately carved frame, “is the door bell. Whoever runs this place enjoys theatrics.” He sounds unimpressed. 

“A nice receptionist with a candy bowl is too boring?”

“Peppermints and toffee aren’t _exotic_ enough.” He unhooks the mallet and holds it out. “Would you like to ring us in?”

Harry hits the gong and a brassy crash reverberates through the room. A shadow darkens the paper screens, and they slide sideways to frame a young Seolite woman in a white sheath dress. She bows to them, her long black hair slipping forward to hide her face.

“Welcome to Rainier Employment Solutions,” she says, her pronunciation as crisp as a radio announcer’s. “May I ask for your appointment details?”

Harry returns her bow, angling forward until he’s parallel to the floor. “We don’t have one. RCM.” 

“Oh!” She straightens. “My apologies, officers.”

“Could we speak to your boss? Or to you, if you’re the boss?”

“Let me fetch him. Please give me a moment.” The screens slide softly shut.

The lieutenant has remained upright for the entire interaction. “You can stop bowing now.”

Harry does, wincing as his back twinges. “I don’t think I’m cut out for Seolite diplomacy, Kim.”

“Good thing you’re a cop in Revachol.”

The doors open again. 

“Good morning, officers!” A man in a starched navy robe bows to them, his blonde hair shellacked back like a helmet. “I’m William Rainier of Rainier Employment Solutions. Before I let you in, could I ask you to remove your shoes? It’s Seolite custom, as I’m sure _you_ know, sir,” he says, addressing Kim.

“I’d prefer to keep them on,” the lieutenant says. Harry has already kicked off his shoes.

Hard Hat glances down. “Ah, of course. Laces are always so time-consuming. We also have shoe covers if you prefer.” He snaps his fingers. “Aya?”

The woman materialises at the door. She kneels and places a pair of white slippers by Harry’s socked feet, then reaches for the lieutenant’s boots.

“Please, let me,” Kim says. He takes the yellow plastic covers from her and snaps them on himself, hopping from one foot to the other.

They follow Hard Hat in, his bare soles squeaking against the polished wood floor. He leads them to a minimalist meeting room, empty except for a large watercolour painting that takes up nearly an entire wall, and a teak desk covered in towers of folders. 

“How may I help?” Hard Hat says, settling at his desk. Inked mountains rise behind him, their craggy faces softened by mist.

Harry begins, “We are investigating a—” 

Hard Hat slaps his forehead. “Oh, how rude of me! You have nowhere to sit.” He snaps his fingers again.

Aya appears. Two folding chairs are placed in front of the desk, each with a plush red cushion. She bows to the men and withdraws.

“Please make yourselves comfortable.” Hard Hat looks to Kim for approval.

The lieutenant takes a seat, expressionless. “As my partner was saying, we are investigating a human trafficking case.”

“Everything we do at our agency is aboveboard, officers,” Hard Hat says quickly. “We have all the correct licences from the Coalition Government and the Diplomatic Trade Mission of Seol, and our registration as an approved economic-cultural partner is up-to-date.” He takes out a ring folder, fat with official-looking certificates in plastic sleeves. “You are welcome to check, of course.” 

Harry sits. “I’m sure we’ll find everything in order,” he says, patting the folder.

“What does your agency do, Mr. Rainier?” Kim says. 

Hard Hat smiles, back on familiar ground. “We are in the business of cultural exchange and upskilling.” His delivery is polished. This is a spiel he has recited hundreds of times. 

“It’s part of a new initiative from the Seolite government. Qualifying Seolite citizens may apply for exchange visas to travel to other isolas and take on temporary residence. They work, learn the ways of their host state, and after a few years they return home with specialised skills and a value-added translingual-cultural paradigm to leverage business innovation and productivity.” He raps the desk. “After all, gentlemen, we are a knowledge economy.” These words are proclaimed like some sublime truth.

“Fascinating,” the lieutenant says. His pen remains capped. 

“What sort of jobs do you find for them?” Harry asks.

“Seolite talent is a hot commodity in the luxury service and retail industries. Especially the girls. They’re hardworking, docile, and between you and me,” Hard Hat waggles his eyebrows and snaps his fingers twice, “they’re very easy on the eye.”

Aya enters again, holding a tray. She sets down a plate of round pastries, then three small cups not much bigger than matchboxes. Tea is poured—clear golden pools, steaming hot. Harry’s stomach growls.

“Would you like anything else, sir?” she says, nestling the teapot onto a coaster.

Hard Hat shakes his head and watches her leave. “The sheath dress is the one concession I make to Occidental fashion,” he says. “It would be a shame to cover their gorgeous legs, no?” He smiles again, his long yellow teeth crammed together like floorboards, and Harry thinks about smashing them.

“Does your agency also provide housing?” Kim says, coolly proceeding with the interview.

“We collaborate closely with a residential services provider and encourage our talent to utilize them. They may choose to live anywhere of course, but safety is a priority for our talent. After all, the purges of the Antecentennial Revolution still loom.” 

He pinches a teacup between thumb and index finger and takes a sip. “Besides, the dormitories are inclusive of utilities. Please have a pastry, officers. They’re from a traditional Seolite bakery.”

“Thank you.” Kim keeps jotting down notes. 

Harry crams a whole pastry in his mouth.

“They’re good, aren’t they?” Hard Hat says, taking one.

Harry nods. Sweet filling sticks to his palate and glues his mouth shut.

“They’re my favourite. Made from beans which are only cultivated in Seol.” He takes a bite. “Very expensive. But worth every cent.”

Harry nods again, trying to pry his jaws apart. He knocks back his tea in an attempt to dislodge the gloopy mass, but burns his gums instead. 

Hard Hat ignores Harry’s inability to feed himself and turns to the lieutenant. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, officer, but where were you born?”

Kim’s pen glides over the page. “The Revolutionary Women’s Hospital in Grand Couron, Revachol.” 

“What about your parents, where were _they_ born?”

“The Princess Lenore Hospital for Women in Grand Couron, Revachol. Same place, different management.” Kim looks up and sees Hard Hat deflate slightly like a punctured tyre. “But my grandparents were from Seol if that’s what you’re asking.”

Hard Hat nods eagerly. “Yes, yes! Do you know which province?”

“No.”

“Fumi-sho? No, Chusan-sho.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You must know your _roots_ , officer,” Hard Hat tuts. “Maybe one of these will jog your ancestral memory.” He rattles off a series of names, syllables firing like bullets from a machine gun. 

Harry glances at his partner. The lieutenant’s lips are pressed into a thin line. He chokes down his pastry and is about to grab this blowhard by his stupid robe, when Kim catches his eye and winks—so quickly that Harry almost misses it. _I’ll handle this, detective_ , he’s saying.

Hard Hat is still guessing provinces. “Kasanyo-sho? No, your complexion’s too light.” He pops the last of his pastry in his mouth and appraises the lieutenant’s features. “You know, you’re the spitting image of a man I know from Hikawa-sho.”

“Now that you mention it,” Kim strokes his chin, “that does ring a bell.”

“So your grandparents _were_ from Hikawa-sho!”

“Maybe so. I remember my grandmother would sometimes sing me lullabies about…” He stares at the watercolour hanging behind the desk. “Mountains.”

“Odd, there aren’t any mountains there.”

The lieutenant is unflappable. “Are you sure?” he says. “Sometimes my grandmother would miss her mountains so much, she’d cry.”

Harry digs his nails into his palms. He knows that Kim’s never even met his grandparents, nevermind been sung to sleep by them, but his partner looks so earnest, so _keen_ , that’s it’s taking everything he has not to start giggling.

Hard Hat claps once with glee. “Of course! Yotake-san’s crystal peaks! They’re on the border of Hikawa-sho.”

Kim nods encouragingly. “Right, and there was a river too. Filled with fish.”

“Yes! The great Ajikawa River, where the carp are as long as your arm!”

“But…” Kim furrows his brows and slowly shakes his head. “There was also great hardship.”

A strangled laugh leaks out of Harry but he turns it into a cough.

Hard Hat shoots him a disapproving glare. “The Autumn Moon Flood of the previous century was no joke, officer. Thousands of people drowned, and tens of thousands more starved in the resulting famine.”

“You’re right,” Harry mutters, covering his mouth and looking down at his lap. “Sorry.”

“That must have been the catastrophe that drove your grandparents from Seol,” Hard Hat says, wagging his head. “What a tragedy.”

“What a tragedy,” Kim parrots. “You have such a wealth of knowledge, Mr. Rainier.”

Harry squeezes his eyes shut. If he looks at Kim now, he _will_ combust.

Hard Hat’s lips peel back from his horsey teeth. “That’s the _true_ work of cultural exchange! Helping individuals like yourself reconnect with their heritage.”

“My heritage, yes.” Kim’s voice is flat and mirror-smooth.

“I’ve always felt an absence,” the lieutenant continues, nodding gravely, “but was never able to consciously identify it until your _intervention_. You have helped me take the first step of an existential voyage which will no doubt shake my identity to its very core. I thank you from the bottom of my Hikawa-sho heart.”

Harry buries his face in his hands, shaking from the pressure of not-laughing.

Kim reaches over and pats his back, maintaining eye contact with Hard Hat. “My partner is overcome by emotion.”

“Yes,” Harry squeaks out. “What a wonderful discovery. So bittersweet.” He sits up and wipes a tear from his eye. “Hoo. Thank you for your help.”

The employment pass _clicks_ onto the table. “Perhaps you could help us again. We are trying to locate this woman.”

“Ehara Natsumi,” Hard Hat reads. Then he shrugs. “I have a good memory for faces but I’ve not seen her before. Perhaps Aya has, let’s check with her.” He snaps his fingers, and Harry fights the urge to break them.

“Do you know her?” Hard Hat asks, when Aya appears by the desk.

She looks at the photo and shakes her head, but Harry—trained on months of reading the lieutenant’s micro-expressions—catches how the corners of her mouth turn fractionally down. She _does_ know. He taps Kim’s boot.

Hard Hat returns the card. “I wish I had more useful information for you, officers. Now, if our interview is at an end, I must gently usher you out. We have a full schedule today, and business waits for no man!” He stands and offers a handshake.

Harry lunges for it and knocks a tower over. Folders avalanche to the floor, their paper guts spilling out in a wide white arc. All the sheets are blank.

“Whoops,” he says.

“Not to worry! You must be eager to continue your investigation.” Hard Hat’s smile does not reach his eyes. 

Kim rises from his seat and adjusts his collar. “Yes, we should get back to work. The tea is excellent, by the way. Is it from the first harvest?”

“I knew you would be able to tell,” Hard Hat coos, and he launches into a monologue about soil conditions, ambient temperature, and rows of doll-like Seolite women picking tea leaves with their mouths.

Aya is already on her knees, cleaning up. Harry crouches next to her and sweeps paper into his arms.

“You know her,” he whispers, while Hard Hat drones at the lieutenant. 

She raises her eyes and looks Harry full in the face, wary.

“Her sister reported her missing. We just want to know if she’s safe or if she needs help.”

She reaches for the papers he’s gathered, her hair swinging forward like a curtain.

“Meet me outside,” she whispers back, lips barely moving. “Backdoor. Yellow grates. In fifteen minutes.”

\---

The backdoor opens onto a narrow alley littered with cigarette butts. Three women hover by the yellow grates, each in an identical uniform of sober skirt suit and sensible shoes. They edge away as the lieutenants walk up. 

“I have my employment pass, officers. Permit me time, please,” the woman closest to them says, fumbling in her handbag. The other two follow suit.

Before Harry can reassure them, the yellow gates swing open and Aya steps out. She motions to the women, speaking some words in Seolite, and they scuttle through the gates heads bowed, avoiding Harry and Kim.

Aya shuts the gate behind her. “They’re here for an interview,” she says, pinning her hair up into a messy bun. “I have a bit of time before their prospective employer arrives. Do you mind terribly if I smoke?” She takes out a cigarette.

“Not at all,” Kim says.

Harry strikes his lighter. She leans into the bobbing flame.

“Thank you,” she says, blowing above their heads. Sweet smoke fills the alleyway. Her expression is placid, a stone worn smooth by running water, and she reminds Harry of the statue of Eum-O-Ma.

“You don’t sound like the other Seolites we’ve interviewed,” Harry says.

“Elocution classes and accent coaching were part of my training,” she says.

“Did you go for that here?”

“In Seol Cite, before I came to Revachol. I attended an elite girls’ academy which prepared us for overseas placement.”

“What else did you learn at the academy?”

“What _didn’t_ I learn.” She gives Harry a small smile, amused by his interest. “Mondial philosophy, numeracy and accountancy, deportment and etiquette, basic radiocomputing, and a whole suite of languages.”

“With all that education, why are you working for that guy?”

Aya takes a drag and shrugs. “Why do any of us work? My mother is a calligrapher and my father a classical dancer. Together they held enough social capital to enrol me in the academy, but not enough to pay its bills. So they took a loan from the central bank. I am to repay it.” She cups her right elbow in her left hand, grey wisps of smoke trailing from her slim fingers. “Let us dispense with pleasantries, officers. You said you were looking for a Miss Ehara?”

“We are,” the lieutenant says. “Do you know her?”

“I only met her briefly about two weeks ago, when she came for a private meeting with Mr. Rainier.”

“What did they talk about?” Harry says.

“I’m afraid I do not know. He shut the doors and locked them.” She pulls on her cigarette and lets the implication drift in the air. “After their meeting, Mr. Rainier requested I pick up his dry cleaning and arrange transport to The Lotus Chamber, an exclusive bar he frequently patronises. They left together. I’ve not seen her since.”

“What was his dry cleaning?”

Aya smiles again. “That’s not a question I thought I’d be asked during a police interview. Is it pertinent to the investigation?”

“Officer Du Bois is perennially curious,” the lieutenant says, writing in his notebook. “You get used to his digressions.”

Harry grins. “I’m a stylish man who’s interested in fashion.”

Her eyes sweep over him, taking in his flared trousers and heeled snakeskin shoes. “I can see that,” she says, smile deepening. “I collected a suit for him and a dress for Miss Ehara. Red, with gold embroidery,” she continues without Harry’s prompting. “Two slits up the side till about mid-thigh.”

“Sounds pretty.”

Aya wrinkles her nose. “Not really. It’s what men here _think_ Seolite women wear.” She taps ash from her cigarette, its edges smudged pink from her lipstick. “If I may ask you a question, how did you come to have her employment pass?”

“Her sister gave it to us when we took on the case,” Harry answers.

“That is strange. We are required to keep it to hand at all times. Our employment is monitored by the Seolite government, and they make frequent checks.”

“What happens if someone doesn’t have the right papers?”

“They are barred from working in any of the approved industries, nor can they receive help from the Trade Mission. Agencies, or _cultural partners_ I should say, are very particular about paperwork because they don’t want to risk losing their license.” The corners of her mouth twist. “They make a lot of money off of us.”

She sees Harry about to ask a follow-up question, and she elaborates, “Agencies take half our wage for the first six months of employment. As a fee, for services rendered. Factor in the cost of accommodation and the welfare contribution and there’s barely enough to send home.”

“What’s the welfare contribution, some sort of tax?”

“Your questions make me feel like I’m back in the academy.” A dimple appears in her right cheek. “A portion of our wage is automatically allocated to a central state fund—that’s the welfare contribution. Every employed Seolite citizen has to pay into it, regardless of where they are.”

“That doesn’t seem very fair.”

“It’s fair enough. You have an idiom here, the rising tide lifts all boats?”

Harry smooths his chops. “Don’t think I’ve heard that one. ‘Fuck you asshole, get off my boat,’ maybe.”

Aya laughs and leans against the yellow grates. “Yes, that is certainly more _Revacholiere_ ,” she says, fully smiling. “I meant to say that the money is invested back into the state—in pension funds, infrastructure projects, and key industries like microtechnology. A centralised fund insulates the individual from shocks and allows the state to grow the economy, thereby improving everyone’s standards of living.”

“To each according to his needs?”

“It’s not quite Mazovian, officer.” Her cigarette glows as she puffs. “And reality is much more complex. But it functions well enough.”

“Why leave Seol at all, then?”

“There are few roads out of poverty. This one is less degrading than being sold in marriage.”

“And safer than being smuggled in a shipping container.”

She shivers despite the heat. “You’d have to be desperate to get into one of those. I’ve heard from—” Aya catches herself and falls silent. Ash trembles between her fingers.

“We’re looking for the people who run the containers, not the ones who come in them,” Harry says gently.

The lieutenant chimes in. “Any information you or your friends have would be invaluable, regardless of their immigration status.” He closes his notebook and caps his pen. “And their identities will remain off the record.”

Aya takes a shaky breath and looks up at the sky. White clouds foam in the blue crack between buildings.

“Ask for Madame Sabine at The Lotus Chamber,” she says, flicking her cigarette away. “I worked for her before I started here. She will know.” Her expression is blank again, closed off. 

Harry nods. “You can’t be happy here. Why don’t you leave?”

“There’s an idiom my father loved,” Aya glances at the lieutenant. “Perhaps you know it, officer?” Her voice lilts as she pronounces four Seolite words.

“I’m afraid I’m monolingual,” Kim says.

“Ah, my apologies. It means ‘the hound eats while the tiger is skinned’.” Foil crinkles as she unwraps a breath mint and eats it. “A dog may sleep at its master’s feet, but it will survive the hunt. I execute my duties, anticipate Mr. Rainier’s needs, and in turn he pays me every fortnight, on time.”

She checks her watch and undoes her bun, her long black hair cascading over her shoulders and re-framing her pale face. “I must get back. Good luck, officers. And safe hunting.”

\---

Notes

  * Seolite naming conventions follow Chinese/Japanese/Korean ones. Family name (surname) comes first, then one's given name. Hence Miss Ehara rather than Miss Natsumi.
  * Hard Hat is technically saying 'the great Horse Mackerel River-River'.
  * Seolite idioms are based off Mandarin's 成语 (chéngyǔ), four-character phrases which convey some pithy allegory and/or meaning. Japanese has its own version--四字熟語 (Yojijukugo).
  * Mouth-picked tea is _not_ a thing, but it did [make headlines](https://www.chinasmack.com/tea-leaf-pickers-required-to-be-virgins-have-c-cup-breasts) in 2011 because horny exoticism sells clicks and papers.




	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bar prep | Discretion | Torque Dork Kim Kitsuragi | Passage | More juvenile delinquents | Frittte! | A break

“Sabine’s not here,” the bartender says, slicing lemons and doing his best to ignore them. The white rectangles on their sleeves do not dent his surliness.

Harry swings his arm out to the empty basement bar, chairs still neatly stacked on tables. “No one is. It’s a weekday afternoon.”

“Could you contact her?” Kim says.

The little knife _thunks_ against the chopping board. “Phone’s dead.”

“We’ll come back later,” Harry says.

 _Thunk._ “She’s off work.”

“I see.” The lieutenant adjusts his glasses. “Detective, please prepare a Station Call form.”

Harry snaps his ledger open and flips to the yellow forms.

“Time is 3:50 p.m.,” Kim taps his watch, “officers arrived at 108A Rue Lagarde, The Lotus Chamber, to interview a Madame Sabine but—”

The bartender puts down the knife. “I’ll call her,” he says quietly, and reaches for the phone. 

“That’s a relief,” Harry murmurs, straining to hear his whispered conversation. “We spent way too long finding this place.”

Kim clasps his hands behind his back. “Basement bar, no signage, just a door knocker shaped like a claw…it’s _discreet_.”

“Yeah, real cloak-and-dagger stuff. Good thing you spotted it.”

“I’ve patronised many places like this. You learn how to find them.”

“Wait, you go to bars?”

“I have been known to. As a younger, more energetic man.”

Harry looks at his partner, trying to imagine him having fun. Chatting to people. Slamming shots. _Partying_.

The lieutenant returns his stare, one eyebrow cooly arched. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“I thought you just, I dunno, stayed in and painted model aerostatic craft,” Harry says.

“I can do both.”

“Bet that made you really popular.”

Kim smirks and adjusts his gloves, fingertips dipping under their cuffs. “Oh, I _was_.” 

The headset clicks back onto its cradle. “She’s coming,” the bartender says. He grabs two oranges and saws them open, their wine-red flesh gleaming like rubies.

“What sort of clientele do you get here?” Harry asks him.

“Men in suits.”

“What kind of men?”

The bartender hunches over a juicer and squelches an orange half onto the fluted metal tip. “Paying ones.”

Harry’s about to start shouting when a woman sails through the heavy door, chin held high like the figurehead on a ship’s prow, and she commands the room even in her over-sized T-shirt and track pants. Freckles dust her nose and sharp cheekbones.

“Good afternoon, officers,” she says, unhooking a bar stool from the foot rail and sitting next to them. “What can I do for you today?” Her tone is welcoming but bags sag under her dark eyes. The smoother questioning goes, the sooner she can go back to sleep.

Harry jerks his thumb at the bartender. “I was asking Chatterbox over there who comes to this bar.”

“Executive-suite types and policy suits for the Coalition Government. Men who want the thrill of slumming it before going back to their tidy lives across the river.” She smiles at the bartender, now muddling mint in a glass. “Corentin can be brusque. Which is why I handle the social side of our partnership.”

“Sounds familiar,” Harry says.

The lieutenant clears his throat. “We are looking for a missing woman—Ehara Natsumi. She was last seen two weeks ago, going to your bar.” He holds out the employment pass.

Sabine examines it, then nods. “She was here on the third with a regular of ours, William Rainier. He was entertaining clients, and she was his companion for the night.”

“How long were they here for?” Harry asks.

“Billy stayed till closing time. She left a few hours before he did though, with another man. One of the clients.”

The little blue notebook appears in the lieutenant’s hands. “Could you describe him for us, please?”

“About one-point-seven meters. Stocky. Bald and pink like an overweight baby.”

“Had you seen him before?”

“My job isn’t to remember, officers. It’s to _captivate_.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder and grins—she’s dazzling—then relaxes back into a tired woman in elasticated trousers, slouched at a bar. “He was a first-time customer, a Mr. Kielholz. Completely unmemorable except for his motor carriage.”

Harry sees Kim ever-so-slightly cock his head. The lieutenant had been dutifully listening before, but he’s _really_ paying attention now.

“It was all curves,” Sabine continues, “and had a cab shaped like a teardrop. Dove grey. Doors that opened upwards, like wings. Its logo was—” she turns to the bartender and mimes pulling a strap around her mouth. “What's the leather thing horses wear?”

“A bridle,” he says, dropping a mint sprig and a straw into a glass of orange juice. He pushes it towards her.

Kim lets out a low whistle and circles something in his notebook. “A Paquet Destrier 22SD. Very limited make.”

“You know your cars, officer. Do you also follow TipTop?” Sabine sips her juice and smiles, eager to make a connection. “We have box tickets for the next race at Zéro Carrousel. Revachol’s finest are always welcome.”

“We will be working,” the lieutenant cuts in before Harry can say yes. “Do you know where they went after they left?”

“He mentioned something about a penthouse with a lake view. But that’s all I know.” She takes another sip. “I look after my girls, but I can’t mother everyone.”

“Have you always worked in Revachol?” Harry asks.

Ice clinks as she swirls her straw. “What makes you think I haven’t?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“I’m _Seolite_ , you mean.” 

Harry spreads his hands. “Alright, cards on the table. We’re actually investigating a trafficking case. Fourteen people dead in a container, all from Seol, and we’re trying to find and interview other potential victims.”

“You are not a suspect,” Kim says, calm as an inland sea, “and we are not authorized to ask for your identity papers. Your immigration status will remain confidential.”

A line in her forehead deepens. “But a Station Call form is still an effective threat, isn't it?"

“Okay, you’re right. That was an overreach on our part.” Harry takes out the untranslated note. “Help us read this and we’ll be out of your hair. Don’t worry about the brown stuff, it’s just coffee.”

Sabine frowns, but she sets her weeping glass on the bar top and scans the note. When she reaches the end, her eyes flick back to the beginning and she reads it again, slower, lingering over every phrase. 

“There’s nothing here,” she eventually says. “No names, no addresses. It’s someone saying goodbye.”

Harry nods, hands in his trouser pockets. “We found it on one of the bodies.”

She winces and reads the note for a third time. 

“Help us make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he says softly.

Water pools on the worn wood. Sabine tears herself away from the note and looks to the bartender. He leans towards her, palms flat against the bar, solid and reassuring in his shirtsleeves. Asking a question with the tilt of his head. 

“I’ll be okay,” she answers, and smiles at him. 

The bartender straightens and moves her glass onto a coaster. 

“I came to Revachol nearly two decades ago,” Sabine says, turning to the lieutenants and giving the note back. “Smuggled in a container with a dozen other people.”

“Did you ever meet your traffickers?” Harry asks.

She shakes her head. “Only their intermediaries. Runners, basically. I never met anyone higher than that, not even on the day we left. We were hooded through the entire process, and were instructed only to take them off when we were sealed in.”

“Do the names ‘Black Dragon Triad’ and ‘Red Talon’ sound at all familiar to you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“We’ve been informed that they're linked to Seolite organised crime.”

Sabine shrugs. “I’ve never heard of them. But it’s possible they only got big after I'd left Seol.”

“Have you had any run-ins with criminal gangs?”

“I can’t say I have. Corentin?”

“No,” he says, decanting jars of syrupy fruit.

Harry folds his arms. “We’re told they run several businesses in Couron.”

“I’ve not heard anything about that either. And I would’ve by now, given all the gossiping that happens here.”

The lieutenant scribbles in his notebook, brows drawn together.

“Let’s go back to the container then,” Harry says. “Why did you leave?”

“My parents made the wrong political enemies. They wanted me out of Seol for my own safety, and we obviously couldn’t go through the official channels. So they paid for my whole passage upfront, and said goodbye. Just in time, too.” Sabine fiddles with her straw and stares at the floor. “About a month after I’d left, I found out that they’d been arrested. I’ve heard nothing from them since.

“Everyone else was there to make money. This was years before the Seolite government started the employment exchange scheme, and none of them could afford the official paperwork. So there we sat in our metal coffin, thinking that every bang and scrape was discovery and from there, death by work camp.

“We had food and water, of course, and even basic pale exposure training. All provided by our traffickers and worked into the cost of our journey. We were as prepared as we could’ve been.” She dips a fingertip in the ringed puddle on the bar top. “But nothing can prepare you for the pale."

“I saw my own birth. The black down on my head soaked in my mother’s blood. I saw Eum-O-Ma pluck the world from the Great Dragon—the Emperor of the Sea—and soothe its broken back until the tides no longer boiled with its pain. I saw black airships settle on the sand, reeking of salt and sulphur, flies to a carcass. My father as a boy, kissing a girl not my mother. The child he conceived before me, already wasted in the womb, the tree under which they buried him bent with peaches. I saw everything. _Was_ everything. Blood and the sea, the Mother and the Dragon, the sand, the airships, the carcass, the peaches…” She traces shapes with water and watches them evaporate, lost in memory.

“Days slipped away. Or hours. Or weeks. Time cannot grasp the pale. I didn’t come back into myself until we crossed into Insulinde, and even now I think a part of me is still there, haunting someone else’s mind. Or maybe I brought its touch _with_ me, and it leeches sound and colour from everything.” She looks up at them, skin pulled tight over her gaunt cheeks, pupils quavering with strange light.

“After the world, the pale—after the pale, the world again,” she intones. “At what cost?”

\----

They climb the stairs to street level, blinking as their eyes adjust to daylight.

Kim points at Harry’s shoes. “Your laces are undone.”

“Oh, thanks.” Harry grunts as he bends a knee. “Well, we have a possible location for the missing woman.”

“But not much else. We haven’t located the driver, and the triad leads have not been productive.”

“Think someone was lying?”

Paper rustles as the lieutenant flips through his notebook. “But who and why?”

“Protecting business interests, maybe? Or not wanting to get into trouble for snitching.” Harry looks up at his partner, watching him annotate his notes. “Let’s—”

“HOMOS!”

They turn around. Tearing towards them is a pimply teenager on a bicycle, his yellow tie loose and flapping, giggling girlfriend clinging to his waist.

“Why’re you kneeling, fatass?! Are you homos getting _married_?!” the teen screeches as he nears them, and he spots their white rectangles at the same time Harry stands and recognises the school crest emblazoned on his magenta blazer. “Oh fuck—”

“TWO HUNDRED SQUATS FOR EVERYONE IN CALMETTE HOUSE,” Harry roars.

The girl’s green nails dig into her boyfriend’s shirt. “Go faster, Georgie!” 

“Don’t tell him _my fucking name_ ,” the teen screams.

“A HUNDRED MORE FOR GEORGE.”

“Shit, shit, shit!” Rubber squeals as the teens careen away, the boy pedalling like the gates of hell have opened behind him.

“FIFTY LAPS AT RECESS,” Harry bellows at their retreating backs, “ANOTHER FIFTY AFTER SCHOOL. YOU’LL RUN UNTIL YOUR KNEES FALL OFF, AND THEN I’LL DRAG YOUR STUMPS AROUND THE FIELD. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

“I think they’ve gotten the message,” Kim says, amusement curling in his voice. “You’ve put the fear of gym into them.”

Harry straightens his lapels and grins at the lieutenant. “Maybe next time they’ll think twice about yelling at people on the street.”

“So much for ‘kids aren’t so bad’,” Kim says with a half-smile, and heads in the direction of the Kineema, parked three blocks away under a streetlamp.

Harry follows. “They really aren’t. But that doesn’t mean you let them walk all over you.”

“I can’t decide if you’d be a great teacher or a terrible one.”

“Hey! You’re looking at the winner of the ‘Best Teacher’ award four years running.”

“An achievement so monumental you actually remembered it.”

“Nah, I found the certificates in a box.”

“They must’ve meant a lot to you if you’d kept them for so long.”

“I think so. Or maybe their only value was sentimental. Couldn’t pawn them.”

Kim glances sidelong at him. “If you hadn’t joined the RCM, would you have stayed a gym teacher?”

“Probably. Maybe I would’ve gotten proper qualifications for it or something. Gone back to school.”

They cross the street, Harry idly pressing the pedestrian crossing button as they pass it. “Don’t think I could’ve afforded school, though.”

“Neither could I. Nor pilot lessons.”

Harry grins. “To get you your flying license, we’d have to bring back Revachol’s aerostatic brigades first. And to do that, we’d have to build a time machine to travel back to ‘08 and save the Revolution.”

“Two more bodies wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“Okay, but what if we kidnapped Kras Mazov and brought him back to _our_ time—”

Kim raises a glove. “Before we start exploring _this_ alternative-historical fantasy, what were you about to say before that oily teenager interrupted you?”

“Nothing clever. That we should keep asking and looking because _someone_ must know.” A bright yellow plastic bag catches Harry’s eye, ballooning in the wind, and it tumbles along the intersection towards the fanciest, largest Frittte Harry’s ever seen. It glitters like a fair.

“And we should look in there.” Harry veers right, following the bag. 

Kim jogs up behind him. “We should go to the depot, detective.”

“We haven’t had lunch. Can’t investigate with low blood sugar.”

“You had a pastry.”

“Doesn’t count, it almost killed me.”

“I was wondering why you were uncharacteristically quiet.”

“Think about it. Their staff may have seen the driver around, and we can grab something to-go at the same time.” Harry stops and stares up at the neon sign that promises freshness, convenience, and criminally good bargains. “I bet they have an aisle just for potato chips.”

They hover near the entrance way. The armed security guard glowers at them, a bulletproof turtle strapped with guns.

Kim adjusts his glasses and admires the Frittte’s futuristic sleekness. “We _are_ in a Seolite enclave,” he says. A part of him wants to see if there _is_ a potato chip aisle.

Harry drives his point home. “Exactly, we should be thorough. Maybe he also likes hard-to-find specialty colas.”

“We might as well investigate. Not, I stress, their refrigeration section, but do our jobs.”

Harry winks at the security guard and shoots finger guns. “For sure.”

The automatic doors _woosh_ open. Cool air wicks sweat from their skin. Wide, sparkling cart lanes greet them and hundreds of brightly-packaged products wave from the shelves. Light jazz covers of pop songs tinkle in the background. The clerks are unfortunately new and haven’t seen a man matching their description, but there are _two_ potato chips aisles.

“What does sarsaparilla taste like, anyway?” Harry asks, swinging a basket of lurid junk food.

Kim scans every bottle in the refrigeration aisle, row by methodical row. “Menthol and licorice.”

“I don’t remember if I like licorice.”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“Why do you like it?”

“I acquired the taste.”

Kim spots the face Harry makes and relents. “It was my foster mother’s favourite drink. She’d sneak me half a glass at the end of every school week, as a treat.” He turns a bottle to read its label, then leaves it on the shelf. “On my birthdays, she’d buy me a whole bottle and I wouldn’t have to share with my foster siblings.”

Harry leans against a refrigeration unit. “Let me guess, you’d stretch it out over weeks and weeks, savouring each tiny sip.”

“No. I’d down it in one go.” A smile spreads across Kim’s lips, smooth as butter. “It was _mine_.”

Harry really, _really_ wants to kiss him. He lolls his head back and presses his back against the glass doors. They’re deliciously cold. “She sounds like a nice lady.”

“She did her best. There were nine of us in her house, all revolutionary war orphans.” Kim crouches and pulls out a bottle from the bottom-most row, ‘SARSAPARILLA' stamped on its label in bright red and white.

He gazes at it. “I miss her.”

“Excuse me.” Someone taps Harry’s shoulder.

“Oh, sorry.” Harry turns to move away from the fridge, and comes face-to-face with a middle-aged man, no longer black-and-white but tanned and lean, what’s left of his hair clinging above his ears in tufts.

“Karl Song?” Harry says.

\---

Notes

  * Destrier is derived from Old French, and is the name for a kind of medieval warhorse. 

  * ‘Billy’ is a nickname for ‘William’.

  * The Great Dragon is a riff off the four Dragon Kings of the sea (四海龙王) in Chinese folklore.

  * The teens’ uniforms are based off British school uniforms.





	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chase | Iilamaraan hunting dogs | An audience | Interrogation | The Sam-Yuk-Gu | Smoking Shelter | A summer storm | Questions

The driver bolts. Harry lunges after him, yellow basket crashing to the floor.

“Stop!” he shouts as they skid down the refrigeration aisle, reflections flitting over glass doors. Harry gains, and he’s almost close enough to reach out and grab a fistful of checked shirt when the driver tips over a pyramidal display for ‘New! Termi-M8™ Insecticide Bomb’ and knocks Harry down, metal globes clattering around him.

Harry pushes himself up and sees the man barrelling towards the exit, and the security guard on the other side, reaching for his semi-automatic. He scrambles to his feet. Kicks bottles out of his way. “RCM!” he shouts again as the automatic doors _whoosh_ open. “Fuck, shit, don’t shoot!”

The driver blows past the guard, overshirt billowing.

“Shoot _him_ you stupid fuck,” Harry snarls as he runs through the open doors.

“Please don’t,” Kim says, right behind him. 

Klaxons blare as Harry bounds onto the street. He barely registers the can of insecticide he’s accidentally stolen, gripped in sweaty palm, and he chases after the driver—now banking right and disappearing around the corner.

“Why do you assholes _never stop_?!” Harry yells as he rounds the block. Pedestrians scatter, flattening themselves against storefronts as the driver, then Harry, thunders down the avenue. He’s still ahead, bald head weaving through a knot of people waiting for the bus, and he’s almost at the end of the block when a white van jerks out of an adjacent side-street and he slams into its doors. He peels himself off, uninjured, staggers past, buying Harry a few precious seconds to close the gap between them.

A Seolite man with a buzzcut and an earpiece cranes his head out the van’s window to see what hit him. Harry shoots him a thumbs up, dodges the vehicle, and immediately trips over a pack of harnessed Iilmaraan hunting dogs and their astonished walker. 

Harry catches himself before he falls and keeps stumbling forward, still focused on the driver, now several metres away and starting to gather steam. 

The dogs look up. The globe of insecticide glints in Harry’s grip, and deep in their little doggy brains two ancient canine instincts spring forth: _BALL_. _CHASE_!!! And they leap at Harry, barking, rope leashes slipping from their walker’s hands.

“What the fuck?!” Harry screams at the dogs loping beside him, their tails wagging and pink tongues lolling. “Get him. GET HIM!” He points at the running man.

The driver looks back and sees Harry levelling his arm like the barrel of a rifle, hounds baying at his heels, and then a shrill whine pierces the air, siren-screech ricocheting off brickwork. The Kineema screams towards him with the lieutenant at the wheel, face ablaze in flashing blue and yellow, grinning like the devil.

He veers left into a cross-street, vaulting over the orange safety barriers. Harry follows, as do the dogs, their toenails clacking against the pavement as they land. The Kineema shrieks past, sirens receding. Harry hears tyres squeal as Kim turns into the street parallel to his— _Couron’s on a grid / Kim’s got a plan / keep this guy running / keep him too scared to do anything_ **_else_ **

The driver is still ahead. Breath razors his lungs, dull pain burrows into his ribs, but Harry forces his legs to keep moving. A construction worker watches the chase from the end of the block, cigarette dangling from her open mouth.

“RCM!” Harry shouts. “Stop him!”

She glances at the dogs, decides that arguing is pointless and lumbers forward, cigarette still smoking.

The driver ducks a swinging fist and tries to dive past. The woman yanks him back, his feet momentarily leaving the earth. But he wriggles out of his overshirt, dashes towards the barricades and swings a leg up. She goes for another grab, but a boot kicks her in the chest and she falls backwards. 

Another distant squeal. The driver clambers over, Harry closing in but still too far to stop him. But now the sirens are louder— _loud_ —and Harry doesn’t need to see the Kineema to know it’s speeding towards them again, diving like an aerostatic craft on a bombing run.

“Car. CAR!” Harry screams.

The driver flinches. Harry’s close enough now to see his eyes widen, and he flings himself across the road, narrowly avoiding the Kineema’s wheels. He rolls, jumps up, and is about to turn right when Harry clears the barricade and hurls the metal globe.

It hits the man’s thigh, throwing him off balance, and he cries out and smashes his left knee against the pavement. The dogs follow their ball, leaping over the barriers, all white froth and snapping teeth, red-eyed and ready to rend—to kill. Tyres shriek.

The driver kicks the pesticide bomb away and the dogs set on it. He hobbles down the same cross-street. Harry darts after, his sides on fire, but there’s nothing now between him and his quarry and he launches himself into the air and slams them both to the ground.

They struggle on the asphalt. A sharp elbow smacks Harry’s jaw and the other man shakes him off. But as the driver pulls himself to his feet and starts limping forward, the Kineema careens into the street and fishtails across it, sirens cut mid-wail. Scorched rubber fumes rise from the growling engine. The lieutenant steps out, his jacket an orange flare in the dingy street.

The driver sinks to his knees, hands up. “Please,” he says, “I do nothing wrong.”

“Then why did you run?” Kim says, slowly advancing.

The other man shuffles back, palms scraped raw from falling, blood prickling red to his skin. “Scared, please understand.” His voice trembles, and he looks back and sees Harry towering over him, ready to pounce at the lieutenant’s signal. There’s no escape now.

Kim stops and stares down at the man kneeling before him. Handcuffs jingle as he pulls them from a pocket.

“No.” The driver shakes his head, eyes beginning to water. “No, please. I have family—my son need special medicine. My daughter, she in academy. They need me to work. Please.”

Laundry hangs listlessly from clotheslines, strung above them on black wire like sutures. Pale faces appear in windows. Up and down the street, people peer out of doorways. Harry spots a sign that spells ‘Sunshine Mansions’ in rusting letters and realises that they’ve cornered the driver right outside a Seolite dormitory. They have an audience.

“I cannot go back to Seol. They kill me, take my family. They kill us all, even my son. Make him dig road until he die, then grind his bones for fertiliser. My wife, my pretty daughter—” he chokes up, unable to finish his sentence.

The driver falls forward and hits his forehead against the ground. “Elder brother, please,” he calls to Kim, clutching the lieutenant’s boot. “Have mercy. Spare this dog and save four lives.” 

They’ve been here before. On a rooftop in Martinaise. Klaasje shimmering in a silver jumpsuit, snowflakes melting in her hair as she pled for her life. Power sang in his hardening arteries, heady and lush. He could curl his arms around her and shield her hazy beauty from the world, or he could wrench her wrists behind her back and shove her head through the noose. A choice. _His_ choice. 

Harry hesitates. He looks to Kim. But the lieutenant’s eyes are cast downwards, regarding the hands wrapped around his ankle.

“We come from the same mother,” the driver continues, “our skin, our eyes, our blood, the same. We come here to live, like you. To make better lives, like you. Why should we die because we don’t have paper?”

A murmur ripples through the gathered crowd. That speech was directed at them as much as it was to Kim. Every eye is on the lieutenant. Everything is still.

Harry tenses, ready to spring.

Kim bends down. “I’m sorry,” he says, snapping handcuffs around the man’s wrists. “We are not the same.”

The crowd turns. Harry can feel it—metal tang around his tonsils, ice crackling under his skin— _the path to the Kineema is clear / buy Kim time / you could take them / not all / unless_ —his holster presses his ribs— _do NOT_ _escalate_

The lieutenant pries his boot free, acting as if there aren’t dozens of people staring, as if they aren’t teetering on the knife’s edge of violence. “Get up, please,” he says to the driver, now catatonic on the ground.

A woman in a shabby house dress steps forward and spits in the lieutenant’s face. He stares at her, back ramrod straight, utterly unmoved, until her heavy cheeks flush and she shrinks back into the crowd.

“Help him up, detective,” he says, turning to Harry. Spittle drips from his right lens.

They frogmarch the driver to the Kineema, his feet dragging, head hanging limp from his neck. The crowd trails after them, kept at bay by the glare of their white rectangles. As they bundle him into the holding pen, Kim slips Harry his keys. “Get in the driver’s basket,” he whispers as the metal door rolls shut. “Your presence is the only thing preventing a riot.” 

The Kineema’s locks click. The lieutenant settles into the passenger seat and looks straight ahead, ignoring the crowd still pressing in, separated from him by a thin pane of glass. A burly man, meaty shoulders evidence of years of manual labour, reaches for the door handle. 

Harry toggles the sirens and noise blasts the alley. The man claps his hands around his ears and staggers backwards. The Kineema lurches in reverse, scattering the crowd, and then zips forward onto the main road, gliding back towards Jamrock. Free.

Kim exhales sharply next to him, slumping back in his seat. He arches an eyebrow when Harry offers him his handkerchief.

“For your face,” Harry says, glancing over, “where…” he trails off, wilting under the lieutenant’s flinty stare, and turns his attention back to the road.

Kim takes it, wipes his right cheek, then takes off his glasses and starts cleaning the lenses. He’s quiet, but Harry can feel a white-hot core of rage burning within him, and knows that whatever he could say would only make it worse. 

“Thank you,” Kim says, returning the handkerchief.

Sunlight skims down Couron’s skyscrapers, dipping them in gold. Shadows lengthen. A moan lows from the holding pen and breaks into muffled sobbing. Karl weeps all the way to the station.

\---

Questioning is not going well.

“Like I’ve said, we can help you,” Harry says, tapping a forefinger against the flimsy plastic table. 

Karl stares at the steel cuffs glinting around his wrists. He’s somewhere else, far away from this fluorescent cubicle that reeks of warmed-over air and stale body odour. They’ve been chipping at him for what feels like hours, trying to chisel out some scrap of information, half a lead, anything, but the pages of the lieutenant’s notebook remain unmarked save for the date and time, written at the top of the page in his neat cursive.

“Is it the triad you’re worried about?” Harry coaxes, “or is it the Seolite government? They don’t have jurisdiction here in Revachol West, and we won’t let them grab you off the streets.”

No response. Harry folds his arms and leans his elbows against the table, letting silence drip into the room. 

“It’s not too late for your family,” he tries again. “We can protect them, apply for witness protection programmes with the ICP. Your son will get his meds, and your daughter can continue her education.” He lowers his voice and tries to make eye contact. “Let us help you.”

No movement from the other side of the table. The driver is corpse-pale, grey hair falling lank above his ears. There’s faint yelling from the corridor as another perp is shepherded into an adjacent interrogation room, and then the slam of a heavy door.

Kim clears his throat. “If you cooperate, we can also recommend that the courts grant you clemency. The RCM has dealt with gangs like the Black Dragon Triad and men like Red Talon, and we have procedures in place.”

For the first time since his arrest, Karl driver looks up. “Black Dragon Triad? Red Talon?” he croaks, red-rimmed eyes looking right at Kim. “Who tell you that, police?” A grin splits the lower half of his face. “They _fucking_ you. Tell you fucking _children’s stories_.”

“What do you mean by that?” the lieutenant says quietly.

Laughter sputters from Karl’s lips. “No such gang!” he crows. “No such person! You think we also cut off our fingers if we dishonour the clan leader? We have assassins who climb walls and kill people by throwing needles? You read too many stupid books.”

“Who hired you then?”

“Sam-Yuk-Gu. You don’t know? Every people know, everyone who come from Seol. But _you_ don’t know, right Mr. Policeman?” He sneers at Kim. “You know nothing, you half-breed _bastard_.”

Harry glances at his partner. Kim has flattened his notebook against the table, pressing so hard its pages are tearing from the spine.

“That delivery you made four nights ago,” Harry says quickly, “the one you picked up near Couron and dumped, did you know what was inside?”

“They don’t say, I don’t ask. They pay me,” he lifts his chin in defiance. “Better than other jobs.”

Harry shakes his head. “That can’t be right. They’re a criminal organisation.”

“They _protect_ us.”

Harry snorts. “Yeah, right,” he says, goading, “what’ve they ever done for you?”

“They fight other gangs, find us work, build schools for children, give food, keep away drug dealers. You tell me how else to live here? In Villalobos? In—”

“There are no Seolites in Villalobos,” Harry interrupts, “that’s Mesque territory.”

“Is _ours_ —” Karl freezes, eyes widening.

Harry takes out the bag of addresses and slaps it onto the table. “4 Gesso Road. That whole complex is your territory, isn’t it?”

Karl’s thick hands curl themselves into fists. He looks down, but not before Harry spots his throat bob and catches something creep into his eyes—fear.

“It is. Please write that down, lieutenant.” The chair creaks as Harry sits back. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Song, all that Black Dragon and Red Talon stuff was a lure. We’ve been working on the Sam-Yuk-Gu case for years, and you’ve just handed us the final piece we’d been missing.”

Karl shrinks in his chair. Harry says nothing and lets the silence squeeze Karl, watches panic bloom on his face under the hum of the fluorescent lights— _he’s teetering / one last_ **_push_ **

“We’re done here,” Harry says, pushing away from the table. “The RCM doesn’t need a _snitch_.”

Karl’s head snaps up. 

_gotcha_

“No, please. I can help.”

Harry stands. “We have everything we need.” 

“Please, wait. I know names. People.” He points at the addresses in their bag. “Apartment 22. I know who live there. Big name.” He tries to smile, patches of sweat growing under his arms. “I meet her before. She smuggle people, many people, from Seol to here.”

Harry leans his weight against the table and stares down at Karl. “You’re lying.”

“No, no, no. No lie.” He looks up at Harry, handcuffs tinkling as he raises his hands in surrender. “No lie,” he sobs, and Harry knows he’s speaking the truth.

“What was her name?”

“Ehara Natsumi.”

Without looking up from his writing, Kim places the employment pass on the table.

Harry spins it around to face Karl. “Is this her?”

“Yes, yes.” Karl nods vigorously. “She brought my family here. Then find me work to clear my debt.”

“And she’s in charge of the whole operation?”

“She report to someone else. Also from Sam-Yuk-Gu.”

“Who’s he?”

“Not he, _she_. Another woman. Tall, big-sized.” He taps his chin. “Mole here.”

Harry pulls his chair up and sits back down. “Start talking.”

\---

Harry’s lighter flame flicks to life. Kim leans his daily cigarette into it and inhales, cheeks hollowing, eyes closed, and he holds his breath for a long moment before exhaling slowly, smoke uncurling from his mouth.

“Let’s go over the case,” he says, opening his eyes. They’re standing in the 41st’s smoking shelter, wedged between the back of the garages and a dead-end alley. It’s rarely used—everyone else smokes around the side entrance or in the stables, scattering when Pryce emerges to yell at them about the effects of secondhand smoke on his horse—but Kim likes the quiet, especially at night.

Harry lights his own cigarette. “Ehara Natsumi is a trafficker for the Sam-Yuk-Gu crime syndicate, last seen two weeks ago. Her sister is an enforcer for the same gang and she reported her missing, feeding us false information at the same time.” He grimaces and flicks the lighter’s metal striker. “Trying to get us to do her dirty work.”

“We’ll have to find her anyway,” Kim says, rolling his neck. “And we need to interview her sister too.”

“First stop tomorrow morning.”

“Mm.” The cigarette tip flares between Kim’s slim fingers. “The situation may escalate, detective. Be prepared.”

“Should we get backup?”

An engine backfires on the 8/81, its asphalt loops still thrumming with traffic. Harry watches Kim run through scenarios in his head, weighing and counterweighing approaches. A streetlight halos hazily through the shelter’s thick glass panels, drawing out the high cant of his cheekbones. Harry forces himself to look away, and counts blades of grass peeking between the paving stones at his feet.

“We should not risk drawing unnecessary attention to ourselves,” Kim eventually answers. “Force on our side will be met by equal force on theirs, so we should concentrate on getting in and out as smoothly and quickly as possible.”

“You sure? We’re heading straight into gang territory.”

“Two dead or disappeared officers would bring far too much heat. I’m betting on them wanting to be left alone.”

“Didn’t take you for a gambler.”

Kim gifts him a half-smile. “This is risk assessment, not slots.”

Harry nods, smiling back. They smoke together in silence, like how they’ve done nearly every evening since Harry’s return. A part of him spends whole days looking forward to it, this span of stolen time snatched from the chaos of their jobs and their city. It keeps him grounded. Present.

But Klaasje keeps resurfacing in his thoughts like a stone in his shoe. Cigarette burning down to her bony fingers, mascara flakes tangling her eyelashes, skin stretched gaunt over her skull, too pale, too skinny, burning herself incandescent, already guttering. Why _should_ he have had the power to choose?

“Do you think we did the right thing?” he asks.

“Which thing?” Kim says.

“Arresting him. Karl Song.”

Kim’s cigarette pauses at his lips. “He’s responsible for the deaths of fourteen people. We can’t let him _go_.”

“We let Klaasje go, Ruby too.”

“Ruby _escaped_. And Klaasje—or whatever her real name is—was a bystander. Not a suspect.”

“But she was a criminal.”

“Her crime was corporate espionage. As far as I’m concerned, she’s already serving her sentence. Wherever she is.” He takes a drag, looking up at the pale streak of the moon, occluded by heavy clouds. “Living with one foot out the door, always looking over her shoulder, no permanent residence, no close relationships...she’s a ghost. That’s not living.”

“And she also didn’t deserve to be extradited and face Moralintern justice, right?”

“No.” Kim frowns and looks at him. “Where are you going with this?”

Harry runs a hand through his hair. “I’m just saying. Karl delivered the container without knowing its contents, and there was some sort of miscommunication which resulted in it not being picked up. Shouldn’t all that count for something?”

“The courts will factor those extenuating circumstances into their judgment.” Kim says, flicking ash.

“We’ve started the process to get his family on witness protection, but the Coalition Government always comes down hard on crime syndicate activity. You know as much as I do that he’ll be eaten alive.”

“What’s the alternative, then?”

“I dunno. Legal counsel? Rehabilitation? Improving living conditions so that he doesn’t have to join a criminal organisation to survive?”

Kim sighs. “With _what_ money? The RCM is run on public donations. We can barely afford to pay our officers, never mind fund those programmes.”

Harry sucks down his cigarette, still gnawing on the problem. “So maybe he has a point. What if Gesso Street’s safer with the Sam-Yuk-Gu around?”

“They’re a criminal organisation which deals in people and sells their labour. They _exploit_ vulnerable communities.” Kim says, incredulous. “You saw those apartments. The whole complex was falling apart.”

Harry glances down at the paving stones. “I dunno,” he says, remembering clean stairwells and green shoots struggling in the weak sun. “I just don’t think we’re helping them either.”

Kim shifts his weight and looks at him. “How would you help them?” he says softly.

“I’d start by getting them the paperwork they need. So that they don’t need to live and work in shitholes.”

“And how would you achieve that?”

“Petition the Coalition Government?”

“How would you get them to listen to you?”

“Uh.” Harry smooths his chops. “Talk to our elected representatives?”

Kim shakes his head once. “Democracy and self-governance are privileges which have not been extended to us in Coalition-occupied Revachol.”

“Revolution?”

“We’d be bombed, again, and it still wouldn’t get them their papers.”

“What about a mural? Like protest art?”

“Would that have any material effect?”

“It would be a gesture of defiance.” Harry says, realising how stupid he sounds. “No, it wouldn’t.”

He inhales the last of his cigarette, thinking— _create community officer roles? / there isn’t a single officer in the 41st who speaks Seolite / you have to start somewhere / burn everything to the ground / there are still institutions worth saving / reform won’t fix a broken system / change is impossible / you’ve done the impossible / no, it’s_ ** _really_** _impossible on your own_ —and the answer slips through his fingers.

“I don’t know,” Harry says. A sudden shower patters against the shelter’s roof. 

“I’m not unsympathetic to Mr. Song’s circumstances, detective,” Kim says, “nor your impulse to help.” 

He gestures to the buildings around them, hunched against the rain. “It’s true, the RCM is overstretched, underfunded, and officer training is often inconsistent. For every case that crosses our desk, there will be three that don’t—especially in Jamrock. But the alternative is letting syndicates like the Sam-Yuk-Gu control the streets. Our job is to ensure that violence does _not_ become the rule of law. That’s the help we offer.”

Harry rubs the back of his neck. He knows Kim’s talking sense, that his partner’s belief in the RCM is not misplaced and is large enough to carry them both, but doubt still roils in him, eating his words before he can explain his thoughts.

He crushes his dog-end beneath his shoe, twists his toe. “The whole thing’s rotten, Kim,” he says. “Everything, the Moralintern, the Coalition Government muzzling us in some legal twilight—it’s not right.” 

“I know.” Kim’s voice is gentle. “But we can’t change the facts of our world. Better to do what we can with what we’re given.” He puffs his cigarette, discovering it’s gone out.

“Is this why you stopped being a moralist?” Harry says.

A zipper rings as Kim fishes out his lighter from a jacket pocket. “How did you know I’d been one?”

“You told me. At the balcony of the Whirling.”

“I’m surprised you remember.”

Harry taps his temple with a knuckle. “My brain’s empty. Less garbage to sift through to get to the important stuff.”

“My former political stance is the least important thing about me.” The corners of Kim’s mouth quirk up. “And yes, I couldn’t reconcile their ideals with their actions. Or _inaction_. But...” 

He relights his cigarette, points of fire dancing in his glasses. “A blue forget-me-not, a piece of the sky,” he quotes, hemmed in by blackened brick, rust stripes dripping above him. “Sometimes I still think it sounds like hope.”

Harry shoves his hands into his trouser pockets, head still clamouring. The rain slows its drumming and stops, the summer storm moving over the precinct. Lightning forks in the distance. No thunderclap comes. There’s another question trying to get his attention.

“Do you really not feel like you’re like them?” he says, looking at Kim.

“Like whom?” 

“Other Seolites.”

“What do you mean ‘other Seolites’,” Kim says slowly, an edge creeping into his voice, “I was _born here._ ”

“I meant, you know.” Harry points at his own face. “They look like you?” 

“You look like Kras Mazov, does that mean you’re from Graad?”

“No of course not, but that’s different.” 

“I fail to see how.”

Harry runs a hand through his hair. “Okay, yeah, that was a dumb question. I’m sorry. Can I try again?”

Kim shrugs one shoulder, eyes narrowed. His cigarette flares as he tastes it.

“Okay.” Harry runs his tongue over his teeth as he corrals the right words. “Karl called you his brother, but you said that you were different. Why?”

“Because I’ve spent _my entire life here_ ,” Kim retorts, plucking his cigarette from his mouth. “We may share Seolite heritage—or half a heritage in my case—but if you dropped me in Seol Cité I wouldn’t be able to speak the language, know their customs and laws, nor navigate their caste system. I am _Revacholiere_ —” he cuts himself off and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I have known no other home. And I’m _tired_ of having to prove it.”

“You’ve never had to prove it to me, Kim.”

“Oh?" The corners of Kim’s mouth twist down and he jabs his cigarette towards Harry’s chest. "Then what have we been talking about for the last five minutes? Philosophy?”

Harry drops his chin. “I didn’t—I didn’t know I was doing that,” he says to his shoes. “I didn’t mean to.”

The rumble of the 8/81 rattles the little smoking shelter.

Kim sighs. “I know,” he says, softening. “But what’s a new question to you is the _thousandth_ for me.”

“I won’t ask stupid questions like that again.”

There’s a warm hand on his shoulder. Harry looks up, into Kim’s face. He’s close enough that Harry can make out the crease between his brows and the fine lines on either side of his mouth.

Kim holds his gaze. “I’d still prefer if you’d ask your questions, rather than bottling them up inside.”

Harry nods. “Okay. But I’ll do better.”

“Okay.” Kim squeezes Harry’s shoulder and draws back.

They stand there, watching clouds drift by the moon. Harry picks at his fingernails, going over their conversation, unsure what to say.

Kim breaks the silence. “Look,” he says, and blows a smoke ring. It wobbles, then collapses on itself, blown apart by a light breeze wafting in from the motorway.

He turns to Harry and smiles. “Mine aren’t as good as yours.” It is a kind of apology. He reaches out to stroke Harry’s arm, but stops, gloved fingers curling hesitantly into his palm, and his arm falls limply to his side. The great unsaid thing moves around them again, curdling the air. Turning it bitter.

Harry takes a deep breath. “I think we both need to do that,” he says, “not keep it bottled inside.”

Kim stills. Light from the streetlamp turns his glasses into two golden mirrors. But behind them something quavers in his dark eyes, like a bird about to take flight.

The lieutenant stubs his cigarette butt against the wall, then flicks it into an old fire bucket that doubles as the station’s ashtray. He turns away, avoiding Harry’s eyes.

“Let’s get you home,” he says.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perdition and Main | The Problem | More | Breath | Mazovian-economics and butter | A debrief | Apartment 22

Kim pulls up to the entrance of Harry's tenement and kills the engine, headlights flicking off.

"See you tomorrow." Harry says, unbuckling his seatbelt. "Get some rest, okay?" 

The Kineema _plinks_ quiet. Kim nods, staring into the encroaching darkness. Most of the streetlights are broken, and he’s a shadow in the driver’s basket clutching the steering wheel in the 10-to-2-position. Almost as if he’s afraid to let go.

Harry pats the arm closest to him. It's like a steel bar. "Kim, if you’re thinking about something, you can tell me.”

The lieutenant winds himself up tighter.

Harry tries again. “You listen to the shit I say all the time and you don’t run away screaming, like the day you put in the new headlights." He shifts closer, still holding onto the jacket, its polyester crinkling. “So I’ll listen. And we’ll work it out.”

“Thank you, officer," Kim says, shaking him off. "Goodnight."

It’s a dismissal. Kim has folded himself up and disappeared somewhere behind his glasses. Harry knows he should get out of the car, climb the steps to his apartment and lie in bed until his alarm resets the day. But he also knows that if he does, he’ll open his building door tomorrow and Kim will be leaning against the Kineema in his crisp trousers and worn boots, and he’ll greet him ‘good morning’ and say nothing else. If they want to address this, whatever _this_ is between them, he has to bring it up now or Kim will deflect and stonewall until one of them is in the ground.

He also knows it’s a bad idea. But he has to try.

“You’ve always encouraged me to say what I’m thinking,” he says, carefully choosing his words, “beyond the case stuff. And I do because I feel safe. With you.” He shifts in his seat and leans in again. “We talk about everything. Maybe we should talk about what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” Kim snaps. “It’s inconsequential. I’m not some perp you can _manipulate_ into a confession—don’t use your fucking can opener routine on _me_.”

Harry shrinks back in his seat. Kim stares straight ahead, hasn’t even glanced at him, severe and distant as a statue in a niche. Harry looks away, going to the yellow stars stitched on the Kineema’s interior panels, then to his upturned hands, inert on his lap.

His head roars. The nausea burrowing into his stomach tells him exactly how much he’s fucked this up— _you shouldn’t have pushed him / fuck up / you turn everything to shit / wallow in it little piggy / why couldn’t you be happy with what you have? / you don’t_ **_deserve_ ** _to be happy_

“I’m sorry,” he says, barely above a whisper. He can’t bear to look at Kim.

“Detective—”

“It’s okay.” He opens the passenger door.

A seatbelt releases with a _click_. “Harry, _wait_.”

He turns. Two strong hands pull him forward and Kim is pressing his mouth to his, eyes squeezed shut. Harry's too surprised to kiss back. 

Kim breaks away first, breathing hard. " _I’m_ sorry," he says, gloves still fisted in the lapels of Harry’s blazer. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Harry covers his partner’s hands. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Kim insists. “I lashed out because you were right. I shouldn’t have kissed you either, and I’m sorry for that, too. I just—” He draws back, hands slipping out from under Harry’s and fluttering back to the steering wheel. He swallows. “I didn’t know how to say it.”

“It’s okay,” Harry says again. “I’ll wait. As long as you need.” 

He stays motionless in the passenger seat. One of the last remaining streetlamps flickers over a gutted sofa, its cushions belching foam padding into the humid night.

Kim’s grip tightens around the wheel. “I don’t want to fuck you up.”

“You won’t.”

“I nearly did, tonight. Because of my pride.”

“You didn’t,” Harry says quietly, “you called me back.”

“That’s exactly the problem. I can’t—” Kim rubs his face, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I can’t be the person your entire wellbeing revolves around. It’s not fair to you nor me.”

Harry looks at his knees. “I’m already fucked up, Kim, and I’m trying to learn how not to be. You’re not the one who has to shoulder that.” He smooths his trousers. “I am.”

His partner says nothing. Harry can see him turn words over in his mind, testing their shape and heft. Kim has always been careful, whether he’s checking forms or his Kineema’s tyres, or peeling sodden gauze from a bullet wound while Harry grits his teeth and breathes through the pain. But he is careful with himself most of all.

His gloved hands slide up the steering wheel, stopping at 12 o’clock. Kim rests his forehead against them and curls in on himself, suddenly small and vulnerable. “I don’t know what to do,” he whispers.

It hurts to see him like this. Harry inches in, moving slowly so he doesn’t spook Kim, not even daring to breathe. 

“I like you, Kim.” He hesitantly touches Kim’s bare forearm, warm and smooth beneath his fingertips. “As a partner, a friend, and more. A lot more. But I’m okay if you don’t want to—or can’t— _be_ that more.”

Kim raises his head from the wheel and looks at him, inscrutable.

Harry gives him a small smile. “We can still be friends and partners. That’s more important to me than anything else.”

Kim blinks. “That’s important to me, too. You’re the best partner I’ve ever had, and—” he catches himself and looks down at the sleeping dashboard. “I miss you. When you’re not with me. At night, in the morning. I pick you up and drive you home so I have an excuse to be with you.” He reaches for Harry’s fingers, still resting on his forearm. “I _do_ want, I’ve _wanted_ , but—”

Kim stops again, voice sticking in his throat. Harry waits, letting him think.

“I’m terrified,” Kim says softly, like he’s admitting it to himself. “I don’t want to lose our partnership. Lose _you_. Even the possibility of that terrifies me. That’s why I said I couldn’t when we put the new headlights in, and why I avoided talking about it after. I thought it would change everything irreparably.” He links their fingertips together and looks up, into Harry’s eyes. “But everything’s changed already, hasn’t it? Since your return, for both of us.”

Harry gazes at the face he knows best in the world. He can tell his partner’s moods from the arch of his brows and the set of his lips, read concern in the furrows in his forehead and glee in the fan of his crow’s feet. He knows this face better than his own. He knows _Kim_ , and Kim knows _him_.

He takes Kim’s hand and holds it to his breastbone. Right over where his trachea splits and radiates into his lungs. 

“You won’t lose me,” Harry says. “Whatever we decide.”

A shaky breath escapes from Kim’s lips. Hope creeps across his face like sunlight through the crack of a door.

“Okay,” he says, and leans in.

“Contact Mike told me about consent,” Harry blurts.

Kim draws back. “What did he say?”

“That I should only kiss you if you want to be kissed.” 

“Very sensible.”

“Do you want to be kissed? By me?” His heart pounds against his ribs.

In answer, Kim cups Harry’s cheek. “I do,” he says, “especially by you. Do _you_ want to be kissed by _me_?”

Harry nods. “More than anything. Can I kiss you now?”

Kim smiles and draws him in. This time, it's good. 

They don't stop and soon they're necking like teenagers. Kim winds his fingers through Harry’s hair, bomber jacket slipping off his shoulder and exposing the sweep of his collarbone, delicate as a bird’s wing. Harry mouths it, following it to the shoulder blade and the strap of Kim’s holster. He sucks a love bite into the skin there. Tastes sweat and leather.

Kim shivers and gently yanks Harry’s head back, kissing up his neck. "I'm too old to fuck in the holding pen," he says, and nips Harry's earlobe for emphasis. "I'll drive us back to mine?"

"Yes," Harry breathes, and Kim kisses him again, hard and sloppy. Harry’s hands roam over Kim’s chest, his lean sides, and then creep between his thighs. He squeezes experimentally. 

He's shoved back into his seat. 

"Shut the door," Kim growls, and turns the ignition. The key catches and the Kineema revs to life, the orange lights of the dashboard winking awake and twinkling in Kim’s glasses. In the beams of the helium headlights, he glows like a stained glass window—light pressed into devotion. 

Harry slams the passenger door shut. The motor carriage leaps away from the pavement and flies through the deserted streets.  
  
“I didn’t mean to shove you so hard,” Kim says, shifting down for a hairpin turn. His voice is even, back under control. “But if we’d kept going, we wouldn’t even have made it to the holding pen.” 

Harry stares at Kim’s fingers, wrapped around the gear stick. He desperately tries not to think about them gripping his hair, holding him still as Kim fucks his mouth. 

Kim glances over, eyebrow arched. “What’s on your mind, detective?” 

“Stick,” Harry croaks.

“No better way to drive.”

They don’t say anything else until they pull into Kim’s garage. Harry’s stomach flips as he realises that he’s going to do _sex things_ with _Kim Kitsuragi_ , and he isn’t sure if he wants to punch the air or vomit or possibly both at once. Gravel crunches softly beneath his shoes. Does his dick even work? Oh god, what if his dick doesn’t work?

 _what kind of man can’t get his dick up / your last erection happened [error] days ago / just breathe, the more you panic it the worse it’ll be / prick’s pickled_. _floating in a jar in a museum. label: human penis, ten-point-six-eight centimetres. flaccid_. _/_ _IT DIED YOU’LL NEVER FUCK AGAIN_

“Fucked up museum," Harry mutters.

Kim's already inside, removing his boots. "What was that?"

"Nothing," Harry says, and shuts the door. The lock _sniks_ home.

Kim is emptying his pockets onto a table, back to Harry. He pulls off his gloves and drops them next to his notebook and pens, then shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over the back of a chair. He has a cute ass. Is it weird to think that? Probably not—Harry gingerly presses his lips to Kim’s nape—they’re about to do sex things with his _broken-ass dick_. 

"I can _hear_ you thinking,” Kim says, spinning around. His eyebrows raise as he notices Harry’s face, annoyance softening into concern. Two fingers find the inside of Harry's wrist. 

"Are you nervous?" he asks gently.

Harry nods, not trusting his voice to not give.

Kim strokes his racing pulse. "Would you like to go home?"

"My dick is broken," Harry blurts. He shakes his head. "I don’t want to go home, but I also don't know what I'm doing."

"That's fine," Kim says. He runs his hands up and down the length of Harry's arms like he's soothing a jittery horse— _excellent metaphor, milord / simile / fucking shut the fuck up!!!_ —and Harry feels his heart rate begin to climb back down.

"You take the lead," Kim murmurs, "and whenever you want to stop, we'll stop. No questions asked."

Not for the first time, Harry wonders how Kim exists. Some days he thinks he’s hallucinated everything and he’ll wake up naked in a ruined hotel room, tie hanging mockingly from the ceiling fan, alone. Some nights the terror grips him so completely that he lies paralysed on his shitty mattress, forcing his eyes open so sleep can’t steal his life from him. But then he’ll brush the scar on his left thigh—a raised starburst—and remind himself that it was all real, Kim’s real, Martinaise happened and so did the miracle, and he’s dragging himself away from the wreck. He’s recovering. He’s fighting. He’s real.

And Kim is here now, waiting for him to come back to himself. Harry concentrates on the warmth of his hands, moving down his chest and dipping beneath his blazer. He breathes in. Then out. Catching and releasing air.

"Kissing was nice,” Harry says. “Could start there?" 

Kim smiles. "Sure," he says. “We should take our holsters off first, though.”

“Not the right kinda bang?”

Kim snorts, his smile widening. “A larger death than we’re aiming for.”

Harry shrugs off his blazer. They unclip their guns and Kim carefully places them on a chair. Then he cradles Harry’s face and kisses him, slow and sweet. Harry places his hands on Kim’s waist, above his belt. Unsure what to do.

“You know, you _can_ touch me,” Kim says after a few kisses. “You don’t need to hold me like an expensive vase.”

“How?”

Kim takes his hands and slides them under his tank, flush against skin. “Like how you did in the Kineema. I liked that.”

Harry strokes his sides. Luxuriating in the touch. “You did?”

“I did,” Kim says, and pulls Harry closer, mouth hovering over his ear. “I would’ve mounted you in your seat.”

Harry backs Kim against the table then, kissing him urgently. He thrusts his hands up over Kim’s pecs, pinches a nipple, and Kim makes a noise and nips Harry’s lower lip. Kim draws back, smirking, then gasps when Harry lifts him onto the table and pushes him down, notebook and pens clattering to the floor.

"I have a bed," Kim says, raising his arms to let Harry pull his tank off. "This is what it's _for_."

Harry admires the planes of Kim’s stomach and the trail of hair that dips into his trousers. "We're here now.”

Kim launches into another complaint, but sputters when Harry sticks his tongue into his navel. 

Harry pauses. "Is this okay?" 

"Keep going."

Harry tongues Kim's navel again, then trails his mouth up his stomach. Kim's breath hitches, and Harry drags his palms over the crest of his ribs, notches thumbs in the dip between bone and muscle— _between costal arch and rectus abdominis_. If he applied the right amount of pressure he could crack Kim in two. Like how—the memory blooms—he’d split apples for Dora a lifetime ago, squeezing till they cleaved.

But he won’t. Not while the lieutenant’s breath flutters in him. Harry would shoot off his own arms first. Yesterday they were in this room, sitting together by the windowsill and not touching. _Painstakingly_ not touching. So how did they get here? How did _Kim_ get here, splayed and goose-pimpled beneath his hands, lungs quivering with want for him?

“Officer Du Bois.” 

Harry jolts back to the present.

Kim caresses his forearms, a corner of his mouth quirked up. “What’s talking to you now?”

Harry bends to him. “Nothing, just me. Sorry.” He presses their lips together and tweaks a nipple, rolling the hard nub between his fingers, feeling a shiver ripple through Kim.

“This is gonna be a stupid question,” he mutters, kissing Kim again, “but are guy nipples as sensitive as girl nipples?”

”I have absolutely no frame of reference, Harry.”

“Guess I’ll find out.” He licks one.

Kim tips his head back against the table.

Harry sucks, swirling his tongue.

Kim arches into Harry’s mouth and flings an arm across his face. He bites his lip, trying not to make too much noise, and Harry’s dick twitches— _doctor, he’s alive!_

Harry switches to the other nipple, coaxing more sounds from Kim, and he palms himself through his trousers, dick finally stirring, and— _preserved to warn children about the dangers of alcoholism_ _/ see their little faces pressed against the glass_ —it’s dead again. He pushes the image of gawking children out of his mind and cups Kim’s crotch, feeling him stiffen.

"Can I?" he asks.

"Just fuck me already," Kim says into the crook of his elbow, muffled.

"That's a yes." Harry says, undoing Kim's belt and unzipping his fly. He nuzzles Kim’s tenting boxers, licking his hard-on through the fabric. Kim bucks his hips, asking for more, lets Harry shuck off his clothes. His cock springs free.

Harry kneels and curls tentative fingers around the shaft— _how does breathing work? / your hands do...something / ohh daddy, it’s party time! stick it in your mouth!_ —and he wishes he'd taken notes when he’d last gotten his dick sucked, back in the pre-Dolorian era. Not that he remembers any of it.

A hand cups his cheek. "You okay?" Kim says, sitting up.

"Yeah." Harry presses a kiss to Kim's palm. "You're gonna have to walk me through this though. Where do I start?"

Kim smiles and brushes his thumb along Harry's lower lip. "Lick it." 

The order sends arousal pinging through his gut. Harry bows his head and sticks out his tongue. With instruction, he manages. He hopes that enthusiasm will make up for his technique.

Kim winces. “Watch your teeth.”

"Sorry,” Harry says, Kim's softening cock slipping out of his mouth. He licks the shaft, trying to get it hard again. 

There are fingers under his chin. "Come here," Kim says, drawing him up until he's standing. "Kiss me." 

Harry does, trying to ignore his frothing brain— _how are you so bad at this / can’t even get your dick up / what kind of man can’t keep his partner’s dick up / Kim’s pity-fucking you. he’ll never touch you again / you’re banned from sex_ **_forever_ **

And he throws himself into the kiss, one arm wound around Kim and the other clutching his hip, driving him back onto the table. He draws Kim’s thighs around him and thrusts. Kim crosses his ankles over the small of his back, urging him closer, and he reaches up and tugs the back of Harry’s shirt. 

Harry obeys, straightening. Kim props himself up his elbows to watch Harry pull the T-shirt over his head. It crumples on the floor.

Harry stands there, feeling Kim’s gaze travel down his chest and to his belly, spilling over the waistband of his trousers, and he suddenly feels bloated, hairy, and gross. He snatches the T-shirt up and covers himself. Stammers, “Sorry.”

There are fingers under his chin again, tilting his face up. “What are you apologising for?” Kim says, voice soft.

“Everything,” Harry says. “Myself. I’m a wreck.”

Kim shakes his head. “You’re a wonder. Don’t apologise.” His thumb brushes Harry’s chin dimple and he looks into his eyes. “Never apologise for this."

Tears well. Harry blinks them away. “Okay. Sorry.”

“What did I just say?”

“Right, yeah.” Harry cracks a smile and leans his forehead against Kim’s. They stay like this for several long moments, breathing each other in.

Kim fans his fingers across Harry’s chest, over the T-shirt fabric. “What do you want?”

“Touch me.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere,” Harry whispers, dropping the shirt. “Please.”

Kim nods and draws his palms up Harry’s shoulders and caresses the curve of his neck, fingertips stroking the skin behind his ears. Harry closes his eyes. Melts into the touch.

“Oh,” Kim murmurs. He sounds tender, sad. “You’ve been starving.”

Harry feels a sob threatening to burst from his chest—he’s definitely about to start weeping—and he tips forward and buries his face in Kim’s neck. Smells soap and smoke.

Arms wind around him. Kim combs fingers through Harry’s hair, cradling the back of his head. “Is this okay?”

Harry nods and clasps Kim closer, hands spanning his back. Feels taut muscle and the supple flex of his spine.

“I think I need to stop now,” he says.

“Sure. Shall I drive you home?”

Harry sighs. Fingernails lightly scrape his scalp. It’s nice. He could fall asleep like this. In Kim’s arms, thoughts buzzing quiet. 

“Can I stay?” he asks, so softly that he almost doesn’t hear himself say it.

Kim presses a kiss to the top of Harry’s head. “Of course. But we are moving to my bed.”

\---

Harry wakes. He’s clammy, heart hammering. The lights of the video rental bleed red and cyan onto her dress, apricot rots on his tongue. But there’s an arm slung around his belly and a warm someone pressed to his back, and Harry remembers that he’s in Kim’s house, in bed, _with_ Kim. Whose breathing is deep and even, sound asleep. 

He clings to his partner’s hand, grounding himself in the present. Breathes in time with him. Inhale. Exhale. And eventually he sinks back to sleep.

\---

Harry dreams of rain. Drumming into the River Esperance, carrying him out to sea. He drifts on the current. Seabirds wheel above him, flecking the grey sky. He passes a ship and it blows his horn, jarring him conscious— _motor carriage / KIM?! / not the Kineema you’re fine_ —and he hears a shower running.

He stretches, feeling a twinge in his left thigh. All that running was a bad idea.

Yesterday’s events run through his brain. When he reaches what happened last night on the table, he groans, grabs a pillow and presses it to his face, trying to suffocate himself.

When he wakes up again, the pillow is being tugged out of his hands. He opens his eyes and sees Kim sitting next to him on the mattress, one eyebrow peeking over the rim of his glasses. 

“Good morning,” Kim says with a little smile.

Harry pushes himself upright. Wipes crust from his eyelids. “Hey.”

Kim lightly touches Harry’s jaw, where the driver had elbowed him the day before. “Do you need an ice pack?”

“I’m okay.”

Kim nods and hands him a towel, toothbrush, and a folded T-shirt.

Harry stares blearily at the illustration of three brunettes frolicing in a flaming cabriolet. “Is that—”

“ _Go shower_.”

He’s under running water and squeezing soap into his hair before his neocortex has registered what’s going on.

When he’s clean and somewhat decent, he wanders into the living room. The table is set for breakfast: two mugs; two plates; butter in a dish with the right knife; a decanter of cold coffee, its glass sweating.

“I haven’t done my market run this week, so there’s only bread.” Kim says, stooping to open the door of his tiny oven. He plucks toast from the grill and drops it on a plate, shaking his fingers. “There’s jam in the fridge if you want it.”

“Butter’s fine. Thanks.” He hovers by the table, unsure where to sit.

Kim loads more bread in. “Grab any chair.”

Harry sits and fidgets. Sunlight streams through the windows, carrying the promise that it’s going to be another hot day. He tilts his plate to the light, trying to place the exact shade of blue. The Kineema? The sky after a storm? Contact Mike’s boxing gloves?

A stack of toast is placed in front of him. “Do you drink anything else in the morning?”

“Nah, just coffee.” He sets his plate down and puts his hands on his lap, feeling like a child at a fancy dinner. 

Kim drops onto the chair opposite his. “You first. Help yourself to anything.”

Harry picks up the knife and scoops a pat of butter. It’s smooth and golden, not at all like the watery tub of sour margarine he has at home. “I haven’t seen real butter in...ever?” he says. “Where did you get this?”

“There’s a person at the market who brings it in.”

“That’s a vague answer.”

Kim pours himself a mug of coffee. “Mhm,” he says, and sips. 

The knife scrapes against the toast. “Is this butter smuggled?”

“I prefer to call it _liberated_.”

“The redistribution of wealth. We’ll make a Mazovian out of you yet.” Harry holds out the piece of buttered toast.

His partner blinks, surprised. “You didn’t have to.”

“But I wanted to,” Harry says, smiling.

Pink tints the rims of Kim’s ears. “Thank you.” 

Kim takes a bite, crunching through the browned crust. Harry takes another piece of toast and starts buttering it. He doesn’t remember if he’s ever gotten breakfast with his previous partner, but he’s pretty sure it’s not happened after they’ve spent the night with each other— _or has it? / don’t ask Jean that / he does seem jealous doesn’t he? you should check / no, seriously, don’t ask him that / focus! what about you and your_ **_current_ ** _partner?_

“So,” Harry says.

“So,” Kim says.

“Last night. Was that, uh, was that a one-off kinda thing?”

Kim finishes chewing and swallowing before he answers. “I would like it not to be,” he says carefully. “Would you like it to be?”

“No!” Harry yelps. He clears his throat. “No,” he repeats at his regular pitch, then takes a huge bite of toast and starts chewing furiously.

“Okay. So it’ll be a continuing thing.”

Harry nods vigorously.

Kim takes another measured bite.

The kitchen steeps in silence. He should say something— _swear your undying fealty, milord!_ —Something normal. Low key— _bend him over the table / it’s a work day / ask him to bend_ **_you_ ** _over the table_

Harry crams the rest of the slice in his mouth. He looks at his plate, then at a checkered dishcloth hanging over the sink, to the windows behind Kim’s head and the city beyond, and finally back at his plate. Kim chews his breakfast and watches him— _he’s wondering what you’re thinking / say something / YOU. BENT. OVER THE TABLE. / anything but that!!_

“Kmmmfffff,” Harry says, spraying crumbs.

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

Harry washes the toast down with a gulp of coffee. “I, uh, I would like it—us—I would like us to be a continuing thing, but I dunno if—that sounds like I want to break it off, I don’t. It’s more like there’s a problem—not with you!” His voice rises in panic. “You’re amazing, so much smarter than me, and funny and patient and really, really cool, and I wanna spend all my time with you if you’ll have me, but I’ll give you space if you need it, and—oh, god, I’ve lost what I wanted to say, sorry, hold on—” And he buries his face in his hands.

There’s a _tink_ as Kim sets his toast on his plate.

Harry inhales deeply, then exhales, trying to respool his spiralling brain. “Okay,” he mutters, and leans back in his chair like he’s bracing for impact. “Can we go slow?”

“I was thinking that too.”

Harry cracks an eye open, peeking at his partner through his fingers. Kim gazes at him fondly, chin resting on his hand.

“You were?” 

A slight smile spreads across Kim’s lips. “While you were in the shower. We’ll go slow.”

Harry breathes out. “Okay. Great,” he says, dropping his hands. Relief prickles his scalp.

Kim resumes his breakfast. “Was last night overwhelming?”

“Yeah, a little. A lot, actually.” Harry grabs more toast and smears more butter on it. “How was it for you?”

“Good.”

“Really?”

“Mhm.”

“But you didn’t. We didn’t.” Harry narrows his eyes. “Are you saying this to make me feel better?”

Kim reaches across the table and strokes his forearm. “It’s the truth.” Fingertips trace shapes on Harry’s skin. “I liked this. The intimacy. Anything else is a bonus.”

“What if my dick never works again?” Harry says before he can stop himself.

“We’ll ease into it, don’t worry.” 

“I mean it, Kim. It might be dead.”

“There are other things we can do.”

“You’re okay with that?”

Kim covers his hand. “I am.” He watches Harry lift his glass to his lips. “I also liked it when you sucked my nipples.”

Harry chokes—green eyes wide, coffee spurting out of his mouth—and he doubles over coughing.

Kim gets up and starts patting Harry’s back. “I couldn’t help myself,” he says over the sound of Harry hacking out his lungs. His lips press themselves into a thin line, holding back laughter. “I’m sorry.”

Harry wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and glares up at Kim. “No you’re not, you bastard.”

His partner grins. “You’re right, I’m not.” He pecks Harry’s cheek.

\---

They’re back in Gesso Street, in front of Apartment 22. Kim is about to rap his knuckles against the flaking paint when Harry grabs his wrist. He raises an eyebrow in question.

Harry points at the door. A thin crack runs between it and the jamb—it’s open, left ajar. The lock is broken.

Kim lowers his hand and places it on the grip of his gun. Harry draws his. They make eye contact, nod, then Kim silently pushes the door open with his shoulder and slips in.

The apartment is trashed. The heavy table has been tipped on its side. Cupboards gape open, their contents lying smashed on the floor. In the centre of the room, the statue of Eum-O-Ma lies broken in a pool of blackening blood, its delicate face turned sightlessly to the ceiling. Paper blossoms clot around white marble.

An iron tang worms into Harry’s nostrils. It reeks like an abattoir.

A sweep of the adjacent bedroom reveals nothing except for more destruction. Books and magazines are strewn across the tiles, their pages bent and splayed. Even the mattress has been slit open, its cotton entrails pulled out. Harry steps around the mangled carcass of a cupboard, its back panel ripped open, shelves pulled apart. Sweat beads at the back of his neck. The air is still. His breath stagnates. No one’s here.

When they double back to the living room, Kim points his gun at a trail of blood smeared on the tile and they follow it to a closed door beside the kitchenette. The smell is getting worse.

They lean on either side of the door. Harry nods as Kim tilts his head towards it, and he watches his partner raise three fingers. Every muscle tenses. The pistol grip digs into his palm. And when the final finger curls into a fist, Harry kicks the door down and bursts into the room, training his gun sights on a chipped sink and a ransacked medicine cabinet, then whipping around to check his back. A bare wall greets him.

“No one here but us, Kim.”

The blood trail ends at the bathtub. Kim lightly steps over it, gun muzzle still pointed at the floor. He looks into the tub. Something wavers in his face, so quickly that Harry nearly misses it, but then he steels himself. Refusing to flinch.

Harry peeks in and immediately turns away, squeezing his eyes shut. Saliva floods his mouth cavity and breakfast heaves in stomach— _don’t throw up / get your shit together / GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT_

He clamps a hand over his nose and mouth. Then he opens his eyes and forces himself to look again.

**Author's Note:**

> \- if you liked this, throw me a kudos or comment! They are very much appreciated.
> 
> \- much love to @reylogarbagechute and @meaculpa who read this beast at various stages of its development.


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